"The kitchen-garden lies through that gate in the wall of mellowed brick--an old-fashioned kitchen-garden, with mingled fruit and vegetables and flowers. There are pear and plum-trees against the wall and strawberry beds next the feathery asparagus and gooseberry bushes hidden by hedges of sweet peas. Another turn will bring you into a labyrinth of yew hedges and so back to the bowling-green, across which the long shadows lie, and the sun-dial which marks the approach of evening. The light is golden on the house and on the tangled borders; the air is fragrant with many scents." PART TWO THE FLOWERS OF SHAKESPEARE Spring "THE SWEET O' THE YEAR" I _Primroses, Cowslips, and Oxlips_ PRIMROSE (_Primula vulgaris_). English poets have always regarded the primrose as the first flower of spring--the true _Flor di prima vera_. This name calls to mind Botticelli's enchanting _Primevera_ that hangs in the Uffizi, in which the sward is dotted with spring flowers that seem to have burst into blossom beneath the footsteps of Venus and her three Graces--those lovely ladies of the Italian Renaissance, clad in light, fluttering draperies. This decorative picture expresses not only the joy and beauty of newly-awakened spring, but something much deeper, something that the painter did not realize himself; and this was what the Italian Renaissance was destined to mean to all the world: a New Birth of beauty in the arts and a new era of human sympathy for mankind. Sandro Botticelli, whom we may appropriately call _Flor di prima vera_ among painters, was as unaware of his mission in art as the primroses that come into being at the call of a new day of spring sunshine from a long dark winter's sleep in a soil of frozen stiffness. Something of the tender and wistful beauty of early spring--her faint dreams and soft twilights, her languid afternoons and her veiled nights, when pale stars tremble through gray mists and when warm rains softly kiss the drowsy earth--Botticelli has put into his enchanting spring idyl; and this same wistful, half-drowsy, and evanescent beauty is characteristic of the primrose. Primrose, first born child of Ver, Merry Springtime's harbinger, With her bells dim is a perfect and sympathetic description of the flower in "The Two Noble Kinsmen."[20] [20] Act I, Scene I.