Endymion.

Our English Hyacinth, it is said, is not entitled to its legendary honors.  The words Non Scriptus were applied to this plant by Dodonaeus, because it had not the Ai Ai upon its petals.  Professor Martyn says that the flower called Lilium Martagon or the Scarlet Turk’s Cap is the plant alluded to by the ancients.

Alphonse Karr, the eloquent French writer, whose “Tour Round my Garden” I recommend to the perusal of all who can sympathize with reflections and emotions suggested by natural objects, has the following interesting anecdote illustrative of the force of a floral association:—­

“I had in a solitary corner of my garden three hyacinths which my father had planted and which death did not allow him to see bloom.  Every year the period of their flowering was for me a solemnity, a funeral and religious festival, it was a melancholy remembrance which revived and reblossomed every year and exhaled certain thoughts with its perfume.  The roots are dead now and nothing lives of this dear association but in my own heart.  But what a dear yet sad privilege man possesses above all created beings, while thus enabled by memory and thought to follow those whom he loved to the tomb and there shut up the living with the dead.  What a melancholy privilege, and yet is there one amongst us who would lose it?  Who is he who would willingly forget all”

Wordsworth, suddenly stopping before a little bunch of harebells, which along with some parsley fern, grew out of a wall, he exclaimed, ’How perfectly beautiful that is!

    Would that the little flowers that grow could live
    Conscious of half the pleasure that they give

The Hyacinth has been cultivated with great care and success in Holland, where from two to three hundred pounds have been given for a single bulb.  A florist at Haarlem enumerates 800 kinds of double-flowered Hyacinths, besides about 400 varieties of the single kind.  It is said that there are altogether upwards of 2000 varieties of the Hyacinth.

The English are particularly fond of the Hyacinth.  It is a domestic flower—­a sort of parlour pet.  When in “close city pent” they transfer the bulbs to glass vases (Hyacinth glasses) filled with water, and place them in their windows in the winter.

An annual solemnity, called Hyacinthia, was held in Laconia in honor of Hyacinthus and Apollo.  It lasted three days.  So eagerly was this festival honored, that the soldiers of Laconia even when they had taken the field against an enemy would return home to celebrate it.

THE NARCISSUS

    Foolish Narcisse, that likes the watery shore

Spenser