MODESTY. 
197 
Let us entreat our friends who would seek 
for the purest and most healthy pleasures, to 
rise with the sun, and accept the invitation 
of Elliott to 
Walk where hawthorns hide 
The wonders of the lane; 
and then — but Howitt, in all his freshness, 
shall tell you what delight you will meet with. 
— “All unexpectedly, in some embowered 
lane, you are arrested by the delicious odour 
of violets, those sweetest of Flora’s children, 
which have furnished so many beautiful al¬ 
lusions to the poets, and which are not yet 
exhausted; they are like true friends, we do 
not know half their sweetness till they have 
felt the sunshine of our kindness; and, again, 
they are like the pleasures of our childhood, 
the earliest and the most beautiful. In March 
they are seen in all their glory — blue and 
white—modestly peering through their thick 
clustering leaves.” 
Barry Cornwall places the violet before the 
rose in the following lines. True it is that 
modesty, of which quality it is the universal 
emblem, is more to be desired than beauty, 
but we must ever acknowledge the rose as 
the queen of flowers. 
It has a scent as though Love, for it s dower, 
Had on it all his odorous arrows tost; 
