"Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity."
Then again he simply touches them, but in such a way as to reveal his full appreciation of their beauty, as in Cymbeline, iv, 2. For the decoration of Imogen's grave the ruddock would bring flowers—
"… bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse."
The "furred moss" to "winter-ground thy corse" is exquisite.
Ferns, though so much larger, so handsome, and in our day so all-attractive, failed generally to impress our fathers.
Butler, writing in 1670, has this to say:
"They spring like fern, that infant weed.
Equivocally without a seed.
And have no possible foundation
But merely in th' imagination."
Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns answered his purpose without seed just as well as with such visible means of perpetuity. His only reference is I Henry, iv, where Gadshill says:
We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible";
and Chamberlain replies:
"Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the
Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible."
In this connection Ellacombe suggests the doctrine of signatures. The God of Nature had written for us his human children prescriptions all over the leafy world. The remedy indicated by its form its own application. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine for cardiac troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for consumption, a lungwort in fact, and so a liverwort, a spleenwort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in fact, all. the old medical writers throughout the centuries, are full of this. Now, what more natural than that a plant which could thus perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible should be able to confer the much-sought gift of invisibility, the power to disappear and reappear at pleasure? Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears to have been skeptical.
Turn we now to the flowering plants: the amount of material at our disposal, as already indicated, is immense. Shakespeare was evidently a great lover of flowers simply as such. His pages from first to last are ornate with color, almost redolent of roses, lilies, eglantine, with every conceivable metaphor and trope—"the bud of love," the "nettle of danger," the "flower of safety." Their lovely shapes are
