"They spring like fern, that infant weed,
Equivocally without a seed,
And have no possible foundation
But merely in th' imagination."
Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns answered his purpose without seed just as well as with such visible means of perpetuity. His only reference is I Henry, iv, where Gadshill says:
"We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible";
and Chamberlain replies:
"Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the
Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible."
In this connection Ellacombe suggests the doctrine of signatures. The God of Nature had written for us his human children prescriptions all over the leafy world. The remedy indicated by its form its own application. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine for cardiac troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for consumption, a lungwort in fact, and so a liverwort, a spleenwort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in fact, all the old medical writers throughout the centuries, are full of this. Now, what more natural than that a plant which could thus perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible should be able to confer the much-sought gift of invisibility, the power to disappear and reappear at pleasure? Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears to have been skeptical.
Turn we now to the flowering plants: the amount of material at our disposal, as already indicated, is immense. Shakespeare was evidently a great lover of flowers simply as such. His pages from first to last are ornate with color, almost redolent of roses, lilies, eglantine, with every conceivable metaphor and trope—"the bud of love," the "nettle of danger," the "flower of safety." Their lovely shapes are ever before him; he is spellbound with their beauty. "England itself is a sea-walled garden." Grammatical forms may vanish, if only the flower may live. Compare Cymbeline, ii, 3:
"Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phœbus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies."
The image of the morning flowers, the fiery steeds that drink them dry, shall fascinate us so that we forget the grammar. It will not do to say lie; the word must rhyme with "arise," and further on with "eyes":
"And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet arise."