THE HYACINTH.
The HYACINTH has always been a great favorite with the poets, ancient
and modern. Homer mentions the Hyacinth as forming a portion of the
materials of the couch of Jove and Juno.
Thick new-born Violets a soft carpet spread,
And clustering Lotos swelled the rising bed,
And sudden Hyacinths[069] the turf bestrow,
And flaming Crocus made the mountains glow
Iliad, Book 14
Milton gives a similar couch to Adam and Eve.
Flowers were the couch
Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel
And Hyacinth, earth's freshest, softest lap
With the exception of the lotus (so common in Hindustan,) all these
flowers, thus celebrated by the greatest of Grecian poets, and
represented as fit luxuries for the gods, are at the command of the
poorest peasant in England. The common Hyacinth is known to the
unlearned as the Harebell, so called from the bell shape of its flowers
and from its growing so abundantly in thickets frequented by hares.
Shakespeare, as we have seen, calls it the Blue-bell.
The curling flowers of the Hyacinth, have suggested to our poets the
idea of clusters of curling tresses of hair.
His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule, and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung,
Clustering
Milton
The youths whose locks divinely spreading
Like vernal hyacinths in sullen hue
Collins
Sir William Jones describes--
The fragrant hyacinths of Azza's hair,
That wanton with the laughing summer air.
A similar allusion may also be found in prose.
"It was the exquisitely fair queen Helen, whose jacinth[070] hair,
curled by nature, intercurled by art, like a brook through golden sands,
had a rope of fair pearl, which, now hidden by the hair, did, as it were
play at fast and loose each with the other, mutually giving and
receiving richness."--Sir Philip Sidney
"The ringlets so elegantly disposed round the fair countenances of these
fair Chiotes [071] are such as Milton describes by 'hyacinthine locks'
crisped and curled like the blossoms of that flower"
Dallaway
The old fable about Hyacinthus is soon told. Apollo loved the youth and
not only instructed him in literature and the arts, but shared in his
pastimes. The divine teacher was one day playing with his pupil at
quoits. Some say that Zephyr (Ovid says it was Boreas) jealous of the
god's influence over young Hyacinthus, wafted the ponderous iron ring
from its right course and caused it to pitch upon the poor boy's head.
He fell to the ground a bleeding corpse. Apollo bade the scarlet
hyacinth spring from the blood and impressed upon its leaves the words
Ai Ai, (alas! alas!) the Greek funeral lamentation. Milton alludes
to the flower in Lycidas,
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.
Drummond had before spoken of
That sweet flower that bears
In sanguine spots the tenor of our woes
Hurdis speaks of:
The melancholy Hyacinth, that weeps
All night, and never lifts an eye all day.
Ovid, after giving the old fable of Hyacinthus, tells us that "the time
shall come when a most valiant hero shall add his name to this flower."
"He alludes," says Mr. Riley, "to Ajax, from whose blood when he slew
himself, a similar flower[072] was said to have arisen with the letters
Ai Ai on its leaves, expressive either of grief or denoting the first
two letters of his name [Greek: Aias]."
As poets feigned from Ajax's streaming blood
Arose, with grief inscribed, a mournful flower.
Young.
Keats has the following allusion to the old story of Hyacinthus,
Or they might watch the quoit-pitchers, intent
On either side; pitying the sad death
Of Hyacinthus, when the cruel breath
Of Zephyr slew him,--Zephyr penitent,
Who now, ere Phoebus mounts the firmament
Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain.
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
With respect to the NARCISSUS, whose name in the floral vocabulary is
the synonyme of egotism, there is a story that must be familiar enough
to most of my readers. Narcissus was a beautiful youth. Teresias, the
Soothsayer, foretold that he should enjoy felicity until he beheld his
own face but that the first sight of that would be fatal to him. Every
kind of mirror was kept carefully out of his way. Echo was enamoured of
him, but he slighted her love, and she pined and withered away until she
had nothing left her but her voice, and even that could only repeat the
last syllables of other people's sentences. He at last saw his own image
reflected in a fountain, and taking it for that of another, he fell
passionately in love with it. He attempted to embrace it. On seeing the
fruitlessness of all his efforts, he killed himself in despair. When the
nymphs raised a funeral pile to burn his body, they found nothing but a
flower. That flower (into which he had been changed) still bears his
name.
Here is a little passage about the fable, from the Two Noble Kinsmen
of Beaumont and Fletcher.
Emilia--This garden hath a world of pleasure in it,
What flower is this?
Servant--'Tis called Narcissus, Madam.
Em.--That was a fair boy certain, but a fool
To love himself, were there not maids,
Or are they all hard hearted?
Ser--That could not be to one so fair.
Ben Jonson touches the true moral of the fable very forcibly.
'Tis now the known disease
That beauty hath, to hear too deep a sense
Of her own self conceived excellence
Oh! had'st thou known the worth of Heaven's rich gift,
Thou would'st have turned it to a truer use,
And not (with starved and covetous ignorance)
Pined in continual eyeing that bright gem
The glance whereof to others had been more
Than to thy famished mind the wide world's store.
Gay's version of the fable is as follows:
Here young Narcissus o'er the fountain stood
And viewed his image in the crystal flood
The crystal flood reflects his lovely charms
And the pleased image strives to meet his arms.
No nymph his inexperienced breast subdued,
Echo in vain the flying boy pursued
Himself alone, the foolish youth admires
And with fond look the smiling shade desires,
O'er the smooth lake with fruitless tears he grieves,
His spreading fingers shoot in verdant leaves,
Through his pale veins green sap now gently flows,
And in a short lived flower his beauty glows
Addison has given a full translation of the story of Narcissus from
Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book the third.
The common daffodil of our English fields is of the genus Narcissus.
"Pray," said some one to Pope, "what is this Asphodel of Homer?" "Why,
I believe," said Pope "if one was to say the truth, 'twas nothing else
but that poor yellow flower that grows about our orchards, and, if so,
the verse might be thus translated in English
--The stern Achilles
Stalked through a mead of daffodillies"