Wealth & Money Quote by James Montgomery

Montgomery doesn’t just paint a flowerbed; he stages a small ceremony of innocence and abundance. “Hyacinths of heavenly blue” is almost aggressively idealized, the color doing double duty: it’s pigment, but it’s also a moral atmosphere. “Heavenly” yokes the natural world to the devotional imagination that shaped much of Montgomery’s work as a hymn writer and moral poet. Nature here isn’t neutral scenery. It’s evidence.

The line’s real engine is the anthropomorphism: the hyacinths “shook their rich tresses to the morn.” Flowers become young women, or at least a feminized figure of beauty, with “tresses” implying hair, vitality, and a kind of conscious display. “Rich” suggests lushness and sensory surplus, but it also smuggles in social texture: richness is a human category, a word from the world of goods and status. Montgomery makes the garden speak the language of culture, not botany, which is precisely the point. He wants a reader to feel that creation is legible, groomed, expressive.

“Morn” matters too. Morning is when the world looks newly made, before labor and history press down. In early 19th-century British verse, that freshness often stands in for spiritual renewal, a quiet corrective to industrial modernity’s grime and speed. The subtext is pastoral reassurance: there exists a realm where beauty rises naturally, where even a simple flower behaves like praise.