Far different from this is a stanza which is a great favorite with young girls on this day, offered indiscriminately, and of course quite innocently, to most of their acquaintances:
The rose is red,
The violet's blue;
Pinks are sweet,
And so are you!
The mission of valentines is one of the very few old customs not on the wane; and the streets of our metropolis practically bear evidence of this fact in the distribution of love-messages on our stalls and shop-windows, varying in price from a sovereign to one halfpenny. Our readers, no doubt, will ask for its origin, and there we are at fault to begin with. The events of St. Valentine's life furnish no clue whatever to the mystery, although Wheatley, in his Illustration of the Common Prayer, absurdly disposes of the question in this way: "St. Valentine was a man of most admirable parts, and so famous for his love and charity, that the custom of choosing valentines upon his festival, which is still practised, took its rise from thence." We see no explanation here in any way satisfactory, and must be contented with the hope that some of our antiquaries may hit on something more to the purpose.
Valentine's day has long been popularly believed to be the day on which birds pair. Shakespeare alludes to this belief:
Good morrow, friends: St. Valentine is past;
Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?
It was anciently the custom to draw lots on this day. The names of an equal number of each sex were put into a box, in separate partitions, out of which every one present drew a name, called the valentine, which was regarded as a good omen of their future marriage. It would appear from a curious passage quoted in my Dictionary of Archaisms, that any lover was hence termed a valentine; not necessarily an affianced lover, as suggested in Hampson's Calendarium, vol. i. p. 163. Lydgate, the poet of Bury, in the fifteenth century, thus mentions this practice:
Saint Valentine, of custom year by year
Men have an usance in this region
To look and search Cupid's calendere,
And choose their choice by great affection:
Such as be prick'd with Cupid's motion,
Taking their choice as their lot doth fall:
But I love one which excelleth all.
Gay alludes to another popular notion referring to the same day:
Last Valentine, the day when birds of kind
Their paramours with mutual chirpings find,
I early rose, just at the break of day,
Before the sun had chas'd the stars away;
Afield I went, amid the burning dew,
To milk my kine, for so should housewives do.
Thee first I spied; and the first swain we see,
In spite of fortune shall our true love be.
The divinations practised on Valentine's day is a curious subject. Herrick mentions one by rose-buds: