say on Translated Verse_, a
poem now rarely read.

Immodest words admit of no defense,[068]
For want of decency is want of sense,

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