12.  Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines of Milton and Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both become clear to you.  The said lines are dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered quotations by the hack botanists,—­who probably never saw them, nor anything else, in Shakspeare or Milton in their lives,—­till even in reading them where they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their fresh meaning:  but none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita calls the violet ‘dim,’ and Milton ‘glowing.’

Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in thinking of her own love, and the hidden passion of it, unspeakable; nor is Milton without some purpose of using it as an emblem of love, mourning,—­but, in both cases, the subdued and quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint of colour, and the strange force and life of it as a part of light, are felt to their uttermost.

And observe, also, that both, of the poets contrast the violet, in its softness, with the intense marking of the pansy.  Milton makes the opposition directly—–­

          “the pansy, freaked with jet,
  The glowing violet.”

Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in the “purple with Love’s wound” of the pansy, while the violet is sweet with Love’s hidden life, and sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes.

Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves a little, what the difference is between a violet and a pansy?

13.  Is, I say, and was, and is to come,—­in spite of florists, who try to make pansies round, instead of pentagonal; and of the wise classifying people, who say that violets and pansies are the same thing—­and that neither of them are of much interest!  As, for instance, Dr. Lindley in his ‘Ladies’ Botany.’

“Violets—­sweet Violets, and Pansies, or Heartsease, represent a small family, with the structure of which you should be familiar; more, however, for the sake of its singularity than for its extent or importance, for the family is a very small one, and there are but few species belonging to it in which much interest is taken.  As the parts of the Heartsease are larger than those of the Violet, let us select the former in preference for the subject of our study.”  Whereupon we plunge instantly into the usual account of things with horns and tails.  “The stamens are five in number—­two of them, which are in front of the others, are hidden within the horn of the front petal,” etc., etc., etc. (Note in passing, by the ’horn of the front’ petal he means the ‘spur of the bottom’ one, which indeed does stand in front of the rest,—­but if therefore it is to be called the front petal—­which is the back one?) You may find in the next paragraph description of a “singular conformation,” and the interesting conclusion that “no one has yet discovered for what purpose this singular conformation was provided.”