"Wide as her lover's torrent blood appears So copious flowed the fountain of her tears; The Rose starts blushing from the sanguine dyes, And from her tears Anemones arise." POLWHELE'S _Translation_, 1786. But this legend was not followed by the other classical writers, who made the Anemone to be the flower of Adonis. Theocritus compares the Dog-rose (so called also in his day, κυνοσβατος) and the Anemone with the Rose, and the Scholia comment on the passage thus--"Anemone, a scentless flower, which they report to have sprung from the blood of Adonis; and again Nicander says that the Anemone sprung from the blood of Adonis." The storehouse of our ancestors' pagan mythology was in Ovid, and his well-known lines are-- "Cum flos e sanguine concolor ortus Qualem, quæ; lento celant sub cortice granum Punica ferre solent; brevis est tamen usus in illis, Namque male hærentem, et nimiâ brevitate caducum Excutiunt idem qui præstant nomina, venti,"-- Thus translated by Golding in 1567, from whom it is very probable that Shakespeare obtained his information-- "Of all one colour with the bloud, a flower she there did find, Even like the flower of that same tree, whose fruit in tender rind Have pleasant graines enclosede--howbeit the use of them is short, For why, the leaves do hang so loose through lightnesse in such sort, As that the windes that all things pierce[15:1] with everie little blast Do shake them off and shed them so as long they cannot last."[15:2] I feel sure that Shakespeare had some particular flower in view. Spenser only speaks of it as a flower, and gives no description-- "In which with cunning hand was pourtrahed The love of Venus and her Paramoure, The fayre Adonis, turned to a flowre." _F. Q._, iii, 1, 34. "When she saw no help might him restore Him to a dainty flowre she did transmew." _F. Q._, iii, 1, 38.