Heart’s Ease

The viola tricŏlor. It has a host of fancy names; as, the “Butterfly flower,” “Kiss me quick,” a “Kiss behind the garden gate,” “Love in idleness,” “Pansy,” “Three faces under one hood,” the “Variegated violet,” “Herba Trinitatis.” The quotation annexed will explain the popular tradition of the flower:—

“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with loves wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness… .

The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid

Will make a man or woman madly doat

Upon the next live creature that it sees.”

Shakespeare: Midsummer Night’s Dream, ii. 1.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.

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