Here are two more flower-passages from Shakespeare.

    Here’s a few flowers; but about midnight more;
    The herbs that have on them cold dew o’ the night
    Are strewings fitt’st for graves.—­Upon their faces:—­
    You were as flowers; now withered; even so
    These herblets shall, which we upon you strow.

Cymbeline.

    Sweets to the sweet.  Farewell! 
    I hoped thou shoulds’t have been my Hamlet’s wife;
    I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,
    And not t’ have strewed thy grave.

Hamlet.

Flowers are peculiarly suitable ornaments for the grave, for as Evelyn truly says, “they are just emblems of the life of man, which has been compared in Holy Scripture to those fading creatures, whose roots being buried in dishonor rise again in glory."[061]

This thought is natural and just.  It is indeed a most impressive sight, a most instructive pleasure, to behold some “bright consummate flower” rise up like a radiant exhalation or a beautiful vision—­like good from evil—­with such stainless purity and such dainty loveliness, from the hot-bed of corruption.

Milton turns his acquaintance with flowers to divine account in his Lycidas.

                          Return; Sicilian Muse,
    And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
    Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues. 
    Ye vallies low, where the mild whispers use
    Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
    On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks;
    Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes,
    That on the green turf suck the honied showers. 
    And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 
    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,
    The musk-rose and the well-attired woodbine,
    With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,[062]
    And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
    Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
    And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
    To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies,
    For, so to interpose a little ease,
    Let our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise

Here is a nosegay of spring-flowers from the hand of Thomson:—­

Fair handed Spring unbosoms every grace, Throws out the snow drop and the crocus first, the daisy, primrose, violet darkly blue, And polyanthus of unnumbered dyes, The yellow wall flower, stained with iron brown, And lavish stock that scents the garden round, From the soft wing of vernal breezes shed, Anemonies, auriculas, enriched With shining meal o’er all their velvet leaves And full ranunculus of glowing red Then comes the tulip race, where Beauty plays Her idle freaks from family diffused To family,