"Pray you love, remember,
There's Pansies—that's for thought."
Shakespeare.
I FIND my Pansies are coming up finely. My bed of Pansies last year from "choicest mixed seed" sown in April, began to bloom in June, and afforded me so much pleasure with their varied beauty, that I resolved this year to have a great many of them. I see, now that the snow has melted from the bed, that the plants have wintered well. I had all of the colors shown in the chromo plate of my catalogue, excepting Emperor William, dark blue. I think that somebody else must have got him, for my packet of seed was divided and sub-divided. King of the Blacks was rightly named, a mere dot of yellow in the center, and Pure White was in striking contrast, while Pure Yellow was golden, and Odier was splendid with its dark center banded with yellow and scarlet. Then there was copper-colored and striped, and such rich purples with a dot of yellow. How lovely they were! They were not very large at first, but in August after a rain, I had superb specimens. They were bedded beneath a fruit tree, where they were sheltered from the noonday glare. They thrive best in a moist, partially shaded situation. The blossoms ought to be picked as they fade, for if left to seed the strength is taken from the plants and the blossoms are smaller.
This season I have sown musical Pansies. "Musical Pansies! what are they? What sort of music do they make? Will it be of the Brass Band order, or that of the hand-organ style?"
No, no! Not that coarse, harsh, loud sort at all. If you could hear their low, sweet notes, you would be enraptured. But this cannot be. I call them musical, because named for the great composers, Mozart, Handel, Schiller, Goethe, Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. They are the "New German Pansies," of which types are given in oil colors, in the catalogue of B. F. Bliss & Sons, and represent the most beautiful strains I have ever seen. They are no fancy sketch, but drawn as true to life in color and size as it was possible to make them, if we will accept the testimony of Dr. Thurber in the American Agriculturist. He says, that "no doubt many who have seen the colored plate published by Messrs. B. F. Bliss & Sons, have supposed that the artist had exercised his imagination both as to size and the strange combinations of colors. So far from this being the case, the flowers are, if anything, rather below the real size, and as to colors, it would be impossible to conceive of any artificial colors more brilliant, or more strongly contrasted, than they are in flowers, produced by this remarkable strain of seeds."