Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/236

224 ever before him; he is spellbound with their beauty. "England itself is a sea-walled garden." Grammatical forms may vanish, if only the flower may live. Compare Cymbeline, ii, 3:

 Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings. And Phœbus 'gins arise. His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies."

The image of the morning flowers, the fiery steeds that drink them dry, shall fascinate us so that we forget the grammar. It will not do to say lie; the word must rhyme with "arise," and further on with "eyes":

 And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet arise."

For the Queen of the Fairies he spreads this sort of a couch:

 I know a bank where the wild thyme blows. Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine. With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight," etc.

Such cases reveal the impress, the healthy, happy impress which Nature could exercise on this the foremost man of all the world, the harmony between Nature and Nature's child. All the plants in the last quotation are wild flowers, except the musk-roses, and these are so common in England as to be almost wild. The eglantine was the sweetbrier, said to be wild in all the southern part of the island and popular in the literature of all recorded centuries. Gerarde describes as follows: "The leaves are glittering, of beautiful green color, of smell most pleasant,… The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats, and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such like, the making whereof I commit to the cunning cook, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth."

The sweetness of the leaf of the eglantine is referred to by Shakespeare in another passage which I venture to quote now for another purpose, to show the accuracy of his description as applied to simple flowers. The lines are from the scene quoted before. Arviragus and Guiderius would bury the swooning Imogen. They think her dead (Cymbeline, iv, 2):

 I'll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander. Out-sweetened not thy breath."