The Riot of the Shrinking Violets
Surely we never planted a single violet anywhere on our extensive lawns here at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville. But this season they are everywhere popping up amid the grasses and sometimes in riotous clusters. There are surely more than a million of them and they all bloom at once. It happened during this last week. No shrinking violets around this spring season! They celebrate the abundant gifts of Easter.
THE PHRASE FINDER offers this as the origin of "shrinking violet."
"In a poetry magazine called The Indicator, the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) drew attention to the modest wood violet:
'There was the buttercup, struggling from a white to a dirty yellow; and a faint-coloured poppy; and here and there by the thorny underwood a shrinking violet.'"
