PREFACE
Many of the selections in this volume are waifs and strays, found in obscure periodicals and newspapers, or in long-forgotten books on the dusty shelves of libraries. Some of them have been gathered from copyrighted works, and for the use of these the compiler owes and renders his best thanks.
Special acknowledgments are due to the following publishers and copyright holders:
The Houghton, Mifflin Company, for selections from the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, Edith M. Thomas, Celia Thaxter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, John Hay, Lucy Larcom, George E. Woodbury, Alice and Phœbe Cary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, and Edmund Clarence Stedman; Messrs. Little, Brown and Company, for lines by Louise Chandler Moulton and Helen Hunt Jackson; Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, for selections from the works of Dora Read Goodale and Myrtle Reed; Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, for extracts from the writings of Henry Van Dyke, Mary Mapes Dodge, Oliver Herford, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; and Messrs. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, for permission to quote from Clinton Scollard’s work.
A STUDY IN VIOLET
Next to the rose, whose divine right to monarchy cannot be questioned, the violet is the poet’s flower. No other is mentioned so frequently, or with such affection.
It is impossible to say when this familiar flower first blossomed in literature. The “Odyssey” would not be complete without it, nor would the “Eclogues” of the Roman singer, Virgil. Ovid was fond of horticulture, and the violet was not forgotten when the bard was inditing his smooth-flowing hexameters. Pliny and Cicero, too, were violet-lovers. In the Bible there is no mention of the flower; but in Chrysostom’s “First Homily” occurs perhaps the first appearance of our little friend in Christian literature.