“ In the violet’s hidden sweetness breathes.
—JAMES G. PERCIVAL.
Perchance the violets o’er my dust
Will half betray their buried trust,
And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
“She loved you better than you knew.”
—ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN.
Nature does not recognize
This strife that rends the earth and skies;
No war-dreams vex the winter sleep of clover-heads and daisy-eyes:
When blood her grassy altar wets,
She sends the pitying violets
To heal the outrage with their bloom and cover it with soft regrets.
—ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN. [Pg 20]
Sure thou didst flourish once! ”

“ Violet, why
Peep from your earth-door
So silent and shy?
—LUCY LARCOM.
O day of days! Thy memory
Will never fade, nor pass;
Patches of lowly violets
Were clouding all the grass.
—ALICE CARY.
Go, modest little violets, and lie upon her breast;
Your eyes will tell her something—perhaps she’ll guess the rest!
—CHARLES HENRY WEBB. [Pg 133]
How gentle is the soul that looketh out
From violets sweet through dim, blue, tearful eyes,
That turns a pleading face to look about
And watch the sun’s course through the smiling skies!
—ISAAC BASSETT CHOATE.
Who beheld it? ”

“ The violet trills, through the bluebird,
Of the heaven that within her she feels.
—LUCY LARCOM.
Like those same winds when, startled from their lair,
They hunt up violets, and free swift brooks
From icy caves, even as thy clear looks
Bid my heart bloom, and sing, and break all care.
—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. [Pg 61]
And now the other violets are crowding up to see
What welcome in this blustering world may chance for them to be.
They lift themselves on slender stems in every shaded place,
Heads over heads, all turned one way, wonder in every face. ”

“ The shy, sweet violet of the wood.
—WEATHERLY.
Her bloom the rose outvies,
The lily dares no plea,
The violet’s glory dies,
No flower so sweet can be;
When love is in her eyes
What need of spring for me?
—ANNA MARIA FAY.
Who is there can sing of a more divine thing
Than the edge of the woods in the edge of the spring,
Ere the violets peep, while hepaticas sleep,
And still in the hollows the snow-drifts lie deep?
—MILDRED G. PHILLIPS. [Pg 36]
The erthe was ful softe and swete. ”

“ All fresh with bloom, with odor sweet,
With brook and bird and breeze in tune,
The beautiful bright earth of June
Moves to the fullness of her noon,
While serving sunbeams round her fling
The purple violets as they fleet.
—HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
Run, little rivulet, run!
Sing of the flowers, every one,—
Of the delicate harebell and violet blue;
Of the red mountain rosebud, all dripping with dew.
—LUCY LARCOM.
Safe from the storm and the heat,
Breathing of beauty and good,
Fragrantly, under thy hood,
Violet!
—COSMO MONKHOUSE. [Pg 98]
O violets, blue-eyed violets! ”

“ Her mild eyes were innocent of ill
As violets in sheltered nooks enshrined.
—CARRYL. [Pg 46]
O violets, who never fret, nor say, “I won’t!” “I will!”
Who only live to do your best His wishes to fulfil,
Teach us your sweet obedience.
—CELIA THAXTER.
When beechen buds begin to swell,
And woods the bluebird’s warble know,
The yellow violet’s modest bell
Peeps from the last year’s leaves below. ”

“ Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers
Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which now are dead, lodged in thy living bowers.
And still a new succession sings and flies;
Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot
Towards the old and still enduring skies;
While the low violet thrives at their root.
—HENRY VAUGHAN.
Blue eyes
Whose sleepy lid like snow on violets lies. ”

“ And soft scents strayed from the violet’s throat.
—BERNARD WELLER. [Pg 45]
When the rain beats and March winds blow,
We should be glad if we could know
How, not so very far away,
There shineth a serener day
Where birds are blithe, and happy children pass
To gather violets among the grass.
—EMILY S. OAKEY.
Like a violet, like a lark,
Like the dawn that kills the dark,
Like a dew-drop, trembling, clinging,
Is the poet’s first sweet singing.
—RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
Earth folds dark blankets round the violet blue. ”

“ A STUDY IN VIOLET
Next to the rose, whose divine right to monarchy cannot be questioned, the violet is the poet’s flower. No other is mentioned so frequently, or with such affection.
It is impossible to say when this familiar flower first blossomed in literature. The “Odyssey” would not be complete without it, nor would the “Eclogues” of the Roman singer, Virgil. Ovid was fond of horticulture, and the violet was not forgotten when the bard was inditing his smooth-flowing hexameters. Pliny and Cicero, too, were violet-lovers. In the Bible there is no mention of the flower ”

“ But for him who has eyes to behold,
The violets bloom in October.
—ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN.
The soft warm haze
Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways,
And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts,
The violet returns. ”

“ With morning dew, and shyly whispering
In tones of bird and streamlet: “I am Spring!”
—WILLIS BOYD ALLEN.
Now boys and laughing girls pluck violets
And all the dainty wildflowers of the field.
—OVID. [Pg 95]
She is so noble, firm and true,
I drink truth from her eyes,
As violets gain the heavens’ own blue
In gazing at the skies.
—JOHN HAY.
The violet in her greenwood bower
Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle,
May boast itself the fairest flower
In glen, or copse, or forest dingle. ”

“ They will have a place in story.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Go, azure myrtle blossom,
Go, violets and jasmine fair,
And star the darkness of her hair,
Or faint against her bosom.
—GRACE GREENWOOD.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet.
—JOHN MILTON. [Pg 184]
God does not send us strange flowers every year. ”

“ Never the dew in new-born violet’s cup,
Lay so entranced in purity.
—NATHANIEL P. WILLIS.
[Pg 113]
CHAPTER EIGHT
Violets, faint with love’s perfume,
Lie hid in tall green grasses.
—MARY E. BLAKE.
[Pg 115]
CHAPTER EIGHT
The violet, she is faint with heat—
The lily is all forlorn;
My love, arise, with thy dewy eyes,
Arise, and be their morn!
—ALICE CARY.
Grow greener, grass, where the river flows—
Her feet have pressed you;
Blow fresher, violet! lily! rose!
Her eyes have blessed you. ”

“ American writers have, on the whole, given the violet a more prominent place than have their English brethren of the lyre. Bryant’s pages, for instance, are fragrant with its perfume, and he has, in special, immortalized the yellow variety in more than one finely turned stanza.
If most of the world’s great bards have been reluctant to give Lady Violet her due, [Pg 10] not so the numerous rank and file of “minor poets.” The verse of Alice Cary, Lucy Larcom, Grace Greenwood, Elizabeth Akers, Adelaide Proctor and dozens of others is a garden of wild-flowers, with the violet leading the dance. ”

“ So life keeps coming and going.
—ALICE CARY. [Pg 175]
Dear chance it were in some rough wood-god’s lair
·······
To sink o’erdrowsed, and dream that wild-flowers blew
Around my head and feet silently there,
Till spring’s glad choir adown the valley pealed
And violets trembled in the morning dew.
—EDWARD DOWDEN.
The sunbeams kiss askant the sombre hill,
The naked woodbine climbs the window-sill,
The breaths that noon exhales are faint and chill.
Tread lightly where the dainty violets blew,
Where to spring winds their soft eyes open flew;
Safely they sleep the churlish winter through. ”

“ But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath.”
Passing to the more recent literary period, the individual taste of the poet becomes noticeable. Strange to relate, Wordsworth could have cared little for the shy blossom. Although he does say,
“Long as there are violets
They will have their place in story,” he leaves it to others to tell the story,—referring to the violet only three or four times in all his voluminous writings. ”

“ O violets, sweet blue eyes of the spring!
—DEXTER SMITH. [Pg 179]
Here’s the violet’s modest blue,
That ’neath hawthorns hides from view.
While they choose each lovely spot,
The sun disdains them not ”

“ Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, for selections from the works of Dora Read Goodale and Myrtle Reed; Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, for extracts from the writings of Henry Van Dyke, Mary Mapes Dodge, Oliver Herford, and Frances Hodgson Burnett ”

“ Some of them have been gathered from copyrighted works, and for the use of these the compiler owes and renders his best thanks.
Special acknowledgments are due to the following publishers and copyright holders:
The Houghton, Mifflin Company, for selections from the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, Edith M. Thomas, Celia Thaxter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, John Hay, Lucy Larcom, George E. Woodbury, Alice and Phœbe Cary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, [Pg 6] Bayard Taylor, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, and Edmund Clarence Stedman; Messrs. ”