PANSY (_Viola tricolor_). "Pansies--that's for thoughts," exclaims _Ophelia_, as she holds out the flower that the French call _pensée_ (thought). And it is the pansy that is "the little western flower" upon which "the bolt of Cupid fell" and made "purple with love's wound" and which "maidens call Love in Idleness,"--the flower that _Oberon_ thus described to _Puck_ when he sent him to gather it. The juice of it squeezed by _Oberon_ upon _Titania's_ eyelids and by _Puck_ upon the Athenian youths and maidens, who were also sleeping in the enchanted wood on that midsummer night, occasioned so many fantastic happenings. The pansy in those days was the small Johnny-Jump-Up, a variety of the violet, according to the old writers, "a little violet of three colors, blue, white and yellow." Milton noted that it was "freaked with jet." Michael Drayton showed its close relationship to the violet in the lines: The pansy and the violet here As seeming to descend Both from one root and very fair For sweetness yet contend. Gerard wrote in 1587: "The stalks are weak and tender, whereupon grow flowers in form and figure like the Violet and for the most part of the same bigness, of three sundry colors, whereof it took the surname Tricolor, that is to say purple, yellow and white, or blue; by reason of the beauty and bravery of which colors they are very pleasing to the eye, for smell they have little, or none at all." The pansy was beloved of Elizabethans: the great number of popular names it had proves this. In addition to Pansy and Johnny-Jump-Up, it was called Herb Trinity, because of the three distinct petals, which made it a flower of peculiar religious significance. Another name was Three-Faces-under-a-Hood because it had such a coquettish air. Another name was Fancy Flamey, because its amethystine colors are like those seen in the flames of burning wood; and because lovers gave it to one another it had the pet names of Meet-me-at-the-Garden-Gate, Kiss-me-at-the-Garden-Gate, Kiss-me-quick, Kiss-me, Call-me-to-you, Cuddle-me-to you, Kiss-me-ere-I-rise, Pink-of-my-John, Cupid's-flower, Love-in-Idleness, and Heartsease. There were no "wine dark pansies" in Shakespeare's time to charm the lover of flowers and none of the splendid deep purple velvets and mauves and pale amethysts and burnt orange and lemon and claret and sherry and canary hues that delight us to-day, and which are, to use the quaint old expression, "nourished up in our gardens." The modern beauties began to be developed about 1875, chiefly by the French specialists, and, as a modern writer remarks: