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THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. 
HONEYSUCKLE ( Lonicera ). Bonds of love. 
“ Bid her steal into the pleached bower, 
Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, 
Forbid the sun to enter—like favorites 
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride 
Against that power that bred it.” 
Shakspeare. 
The poets have repeatedly celebrated this delightful 
flower under the name of woodbine. 
The delicious bank in Midsummer Night’s Dream was 
“ Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine.” 
The opposite attributes of inconstancy and fidelity 
have been ascribed to the honeysuckle by two poets, 
but the following lines are most certainly a slander 
on this sweet flower — 
“ Inconstant woodbine, wherefore rove 
With gadding stem about my bower ? 
Why, with my darling myrtle wove, 
In bold defiance mock my power ? ” 
Carew. 
Rather let us believe with good old Dan Chaucer, 
in the Floure and the Leafe,— 
“ And those that were chapelets on their hede, 
Of fresh woodbind, be such as never were 
To love untrue in word, in thought, in dede, 
But ay stedfast, ne for plesaunce ne fere, 
Tho’ that they shudde their hertis all to tere, 
A\ ould never flit, but evir were stedfast, 
Till that ther livis these assunder brast.” 
Sometimes we see a young honeysuckle lovingly wind 
its slender arms around the knotty trunk of an old oak : 
one would say that this weak shrub wished, springing 
aloft, to surpass the king of the forests in height; but 
