Read it through once

For many centuries flowers were considered as pleasing and attractive decorations stuck about the world in the same way as they are put in a drawing-room in order to give people pleasure. Very soon they were found to be extremely useful in poetry, sometimes to point a moral or disguise a sermon, like the primrose in _Peter Bell_, but more generally to produce a good impression on the BELOVED OBJECT. Burns puts the usual view of flowers very nicely in the following: "But I will down yon river rove amang the woods sae green, and a' to pu' a posie to my ain dear May." Possibly this is the meaning also in the exquisite lines of Shakespeare about the pansy:--