Primroses when pale are the palest of all withering plants. The flowers change color with maturity, especially after fertilization. The paleness of the primrose is the pallor of decay. But the azure harebell—behold it waving on its slender stipe beneath the shade of some great rock—who can look into its delicate cerulean cup again and not bethink him of the blue-veined eyelid sleep that falls upon our human flowers!
The same accuracy of detail is evinced in many other places. Take, for instance, Shakespeare's description of the violet all the way through. It moves him chiefly by its odor (King John, iv, 2):
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet.
To smooth the ice, to add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish.
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."
Nevertheless, we have violets dim, and violets blue, and purple violets, and more particularly "blue-veined" violets, as if the poet looked with a lens into the very throat of the flower which Frenchmen call a thought." And there is pansies—that's for thoughts." His description of the elm is equally exact (Midsummer-Night's Dream, iv, 1, 47-49):
"So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm."
There is nothing better than that, as you may prove by examining the twigs of even some of our American species; the cork elm, for instance. The hawthorn, the cedar, and the pine and the oak especially, are most naturally treated. These are Shakespeare's familiar trees. The cedar of Shakespeare is the cedar of Lebanon, commonly planted throughout Europe since the time of the Crusades. Shakespeare had probably seen specimens in England. He uses it as the type of all that is great and fine. One author thinks he copies Ezekiel, chapter xxxi. The pine was beside him all the while. He knew the secret of the pine knot, and well describes it (Troilus and Cressida, i, 3):
"… checks and disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest reared,
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Deflect the sound pine and divert his grain
Tortive and errant from his course of growth."
Any one who has ever examined the case, or even one who has handled knotty lumber, has seen the wood fiber run around the persistent base of some dead limb, and can appreciate these lines.
