





















hee Se Ne ee ee 
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 allu- 
sions to the poets, and which are not yet ex- 
hausted ; 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 its dower, 
Had on it all his odorous arrows tost ; 











