FullReads

“As cowslip unto oxlip is,
So seems she to the boy.”

Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose,–a rank, tall weed that blooms with the mullein in late summer. Its small, yellow, slightly fragrant blossoms open only at night, but remain open during the next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers generally mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs to a different family of plants, but which, as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a very good substitute for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the shooting star, is very rare, and is one of the most beautiful of native flowers. I believe it is not found north of Pennsylvania. I have found it in a single locality in the District of Columbia, and the day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of pink flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving the air. I do not know that it has ever been mentioned in poetry.

Another flower, which I suspect our poets see largely through the medium of English literature and invest with borrowed charms, is the violet. The violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in England than it is in this country, for the reason that it comes very early and is sweet-scented; our common violet is not among the earliest flowers, and it is odorless. It affects sunny slopes, like the English flower; yet Shakespeare never could have made the allusion to it which he makes to his own species in these lines:–

“That strain again! it had a dying fall:
Oh! it came o’er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor,”

or lauded it as

“Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath.”

Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, white, lilac-veined species (not yellow, as Bryant has it in his poem), that is common in wet, out-of-the-way places. Our common blue violet–the only species that is found abundantly everywhere in the North–blooms in May, and makes bright many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook. Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in one that the earlier and more delicate spring flowers do,–the hepatica, say, with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile expression, and at times its delicate perfume; or the houstonia,–“innocence,”– flecking or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky way of minute stars; or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the English violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea’s or any other blooming goddess’s cheek. Yet these flowers have no classical associations, and are consequently far less often upon the lips of our poets than the violet.

To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him. The term has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow- lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi. Hence I am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks in his “Spring Pastoral” of

“Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the bluebird.”

Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north, and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years. It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or later.]

The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it, it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this respect, except where he followed the superstition and the imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey- bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into the mouth of Banquo!–