Violets, Love, and a Link-Up

Heidi Peterson has started a new link-up series on her writing blog, where she'll post a subject each month, and whoever wants to can do a post that involves that subject and then link up on her blog.  This month's subject is violets, and as soon as I read that, I knew what I wanted to post about:  the scene in A Room with a View by E. M. Forster where Lucy falls into a sea of violets, quite unexpectedly, rather the way one falls in love.  Here it is, from chapter six:

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.

"Courage!" cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. "Courage and love."

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her.

Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, "Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!" The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett who stood brown against the view.

Isn't that a marvelous scene?  Even if you don't know the characters (and if you don't, please do yourself a favor and read the book!), that description of the violets, of a place where "beauty gushed out to water the earth" is so magical, isn't it?

Violets are one of my favorite flowers -- I love finding them growing wild in my lawn.  I have African violets in my kitchen too, to have a spot of beauty all year long.

Oh, and this month's link-up also involves a giveaway!  Go here to learn more.