X.—FLEUR DE LYS.
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description of the birth of Iamus, the yellow water-flag, which you know so well in spring, by the banks of your Oxford streams.[1] But, in general, it means simply the springing of beautiful and orderly vegetation in fields upon which the dew falls pure. It is the expression, therefore, of peace on the redeemed and cultivated earth, and of the pleasure of Heaven in the uncareful happiness of men clothed without labour, and fed without fear.
253. In the passage, so often read by us, which announces the advent of Christianity as the dawn of peace on earth, we habitually neglect great part of the promise, owing to the false translation of the second clause of the sentence.
I cannot understand how it should be still needful
- ↑ In the catalogues of the collection of drawings in this room, and in my "Queen of the Air") §§ 82 seqq.), you will find all that I would ask you to notice about the various names and kinds of the flower, and their symbolic use.—Note only, with respect to our present purpose, that while the true white lily is placed in the hands of the Angel of the Annunciation even by Florentine artists, in their general design, the fleur-de-lys is given to him by Giovanni Pisano on the façade of Orvieto; and that the flower in the crown-circlets of European kings answers, as I stated to you in my lecture on the Corona, to the Narcissus fillet of early Greece; the crown of abundance and rejoicing.
