Blossoming— and Stricken in Days. Common Heath. (Ling.) PROSERPINA ALSO ARIADNE FLORENTINA THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE ST. MARK'S REST LECTURES ON ART THE ELEMENTS OF PERSPECTIVE BY JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. AUTHOR OF "THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE," 44 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE," ** SESAME AND LILIES," ETC. BOSTON ALDINE BOOK PUBLISHING CO. PUBLISHERS CONTENTS. PROSERPINA. Volume L PAGI Introduction, ....... 5 CHAPTER I. Moss, . . . . . . * 13 CHAPTER II. The Root, . . . . . • . .22 CHAPTER III. The Leaf, ....... 31 CHAPTER IV. The Flower, ....... , 48 CHAPTER V. Papaver Rhoeas, 63 CHAPTER VI. The Parable of Joash, . . 76 CHAPTER VII. The Parable of Jotham, * » 83 CHAPTER VIII. The Stem, ........ 90 CHAPTER IX. Outside and In, . • . . , . r . 107 The Hark, Genealogy, Cora and Kronos, The Seed and Husk, The Fruit Gift, . Viola, . Pinguicula, Veronica, GlULIETTA, CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. Volume II. CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. INDEX I. Descriptive Nomenclature, INDEX II. English Names, .... INDEX III. Latin or Greek Names, > THE GETTY CENTER LIBRARY ARIADNE FLORENTINE PAGE LECTURE I. Definition of the Art of Engraving, .... 249 LECTURE II. The Relation of Engraving to other Arts in Florence, 268 LECTURE III. The Technics of Wood Engraving, .... 288 LECTURE IV. Thf Technics op Metal Engraving, . . . 306 LECTURE V. Design in the German Schools of Engraving (Holbein and durer, ....... 324 LECTURE VI. Design in the Florentine Schools of Engraving (Sandro Botticelli), ...... 350 APPENDIX. ARTICLE I. Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England . 385 ARTICLE II. Detached Notes, . . . e <. 396 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PROSERPINA, Volume L FIGURE PAG3 1. Florae Dannie 0 14 2. Moss Plant ...... „ 17 3. Leaf of the Alisma ..... 41 4. 5, 6. Diagrams of Leaves. Petals . . « 54-56 7. Primrose ....... 59 8, 9. Development of Pease Blossom . . « .60 10. Welsh Poppy ...... 66 11. Profile of Welsh Poppy . . . . • 67 12. Poppy ....... 68 13. Outline of Leaf of Burdock . • . • 93 14. Burdock Leaf Illustrated by Paper ... 94 15. Primulas . . . . . . .101 16. 17. Diagrams of Three Stemmed Leaves • • 108 18. Ragged Robin . . . . . ,109 19. Monocot Plant ...... 109 FIG. PAGE 20. Arethusan Leaf . . . . .no 21. Arethusan Leaf cut from Paper . . in 22. Species of Grass 112 23. Fleur-de -lys Leaf . . . . 0 .114 Volume II. 1. Violet Leaf . . . . . , .174 2. Violet ....... 180 Virgula . . . . . . , . 199 4. Veronica Regina . . . . . . 211 j. Flora Danica . . . . . . . 215 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 1. Shape of Soltd Ploughshare .... 289 4 Cross Hatching • •••*• 299 LIST OF PLATES. riOSERPINA. PLaTES FACiNG PAGE I. Blossoming — and Stricken in Days. {Frontispiece) II. Central Type of Leaves. Common Bay Laurel . 34 III. Acanthoid Leaves. Northern Attic Type . . 82 IV. Crested Leaves. Lettuce Thistles . . 83 V. Occult Spiral Action. Waste Thistle . . 97 VI. Radical InsertioxN of Leaves of Ensat^ Iris Ger- man ica . . . . . . 122 VII. Contorto Purpurea. Purple Wreath- Wort . 125 VIII. Myrtilla Regina . , . . .150 IX. Viola Canina ..... c 165 X. Viola Canina. Structural Details . • 180 XI. States of Adversity , , . • 230 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. FLATKS PAGE L Things Celestial and Terrestrial • • 302 II. The Star of Florence ..... 306 III. At Evening, from the Top of Fesole . . 317 IV. By the Springs of Parnassus .... 321 V. Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion . . 335 VI. Fairness of the Sea and Air .... 338 VII. For a Time and Times .... 372 VIII. The Nymph Beloved of Apollo. Michael Angelo . 373 IX. In the Woods of Ida ..... 373 X. Grass of the Desert ..... 376 XI. Obediente Domino voci hominis . . . 385 XII. The Coronation in the Garden . . # 396 PROSERPINA STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS INTRODUCTION. Brantwood, 14th March, 1874- Yesterday evening I was looking over the first book in which I studied Botany, — Curtis's Magazine, published in 1795 at No. 3, St. George's Crescent, Blackfriars Road, and sold by the principal booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland. Its plates are excellent, so that I am always glad to find in it the picture of a flow T er I know. And I came yesterday upon what I suppose to be a variety of a favourite flower of mine, called, in Curtis, " the St. Bruno's Lily." I am obliged to say " what I suppose to be a variety," be- cause my pet lily is branched,* while this is drawn as un- branched, and especially stated to be so. And the page of text, in which this statement is made, is so characteristic of botanical books, and botanical science, not to say all science as hitherto taught for the blessing of mankind ; and of the diffi- culties thereby accompanying its communication, that I extract the page entire, printing it, on page 7, as nearly as possible in facsimile. Now you observe, in this instructive page, that you have in the first place, nine names given you for one flower ; and that among these nine names, you are not even at liberty to make your choice, because the united authority of Haller and Miller may be considered as an accurate balance to the single author- ity of Linnaeus ; and you ought therefore for the present to remain, yourself, balanced between the sides. You may be farther embarrassed by finding that the Anthericum of Savoy * At least, it throws off its flowers on each side in a bewilderingly pretty way ; a real lily can't branch, I believe : bnt, if not, what is the use of the botanical books saying " on an unbranched stem" ? 6 INTRODUCTION, is only described as growing in Switzerland. And farther still, by finding that Mr. Miller describes two varieties of it, which differ only in size, while you are left to conjecture w T hether the one here figured is the larger or smaller ; and how great the difference is. Farther, If you wish to know anything of the habits of the plant, as well as its nine names, you are informed that it grows both at the bottoms of the mountains, and the tops ; and that, with us. it flowers in May and June, — but you are not told when, in its native country. The four lines of the last clause but one, may indeed be useful to gardeners ; but — although I know my good father and mother did the best they could for me in buying this beautiful book ; and though the admirable plates of it did their work, and taught me much, I cannot wonder that neither my infantine nor boyish mind was irresistibly attracted by the text of which this page is one of the most favourable speci- mens ; nor, in consequence, that my botanical studies were — when I had attained the age of fifty — no farther advanced than the reader will find them in the opening chapter of this book. Which said book was therefore undertaken, to put, if it might be, some elements of the science of botany into a form more tenable by ordinary human and childish faculties ; or — for I can scarcely say I have yet any tenure of it myself — to make the paths of approach to it more pleasant. In fact, I only know, of it, the pleasant distant effects which it bears to simple eyes ; and some pretty mists and mysteries, which I invite my young readers to pierce, as they may, for themselves, — my power of guiding them being only for a little way. Pretty mysteries, I say, as opposed to the vulgar and ugly mysteries of the so-called science of botany, — exemplified suf- ficiently in this chosen page. Respecting which, please ob- serve farther ; — Nobody — I can say this very boldly — loves Latin more dearly than I ; but, precisely because I do love it (as well as for other reasons), I have always insisted that books, whether scientific or not, ought to be written either in Latin, or English ; and not in a doggish mixture of the refuse of both. INTRODUCTION. 7 Antiiericum Liliastrum. Savoy Antiiericum, or St Bruno's Lily. Class and Order. Hexandria Monogynia. Generic Character. Cor. 6-petala, patens. Caps, ovata. Specific Character and Synonyms. ANTHERICUM Liliastrum f oliis planis, scapo simplicissimo, corollis campanulatis, staminibus declinatis. Linn. Syst. Vegetab. ed. 14. Murr. p. 330. Ait. Kew. v. I. p. 449. HEMEROCALLIS floribus patulis secundis. Hall. Hist, n. 1230. PHALANGIUM magno fiore. Bauh. Pin. 29. PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum majus. Clus. cur. app. alt. PHALANGIUM Allobrogicum. The Savoye Spider-wort. Park. Parad. p. 150. tab. 151./. 1. Botanists are divided in their opinions respecting the genus of this plant ; Linnaeus considers it as an Anthericum, Haller and Miller make it an Hemerocallis. It is a native of Switzerland, where, Haller informs us, it grows abundantly in the Alpine meadows, and even on the summits of the mountains ; with us it flowers in May and June. It is a plant of great elegance, producing on an unbranched stem about a foot and a half high, numerous flowers of a delicate white colour, much smaller but resembling in form those of the common white lily, pos- sessing a considerable degree of fragrance, their beauty is heightened by the rich orange colour of their antherse ; unfortunately they are but of short duration. Miller describes two varieties of it differing merely in size. A loamy soil, a situation moderately moist, with an eastern or western exposure, suits this plant best ; so situated, it will increase by its roots, though not very fast, and by parting of these in the autumn, it is usu- ally propagated. Parkinson describes and figures it in his Parad. Terrest., observing that ''divers allured by the beauty of its flowers, had brought it into these parts." 8 INTRODUCTION. Linnaeus wrote a noble book of universal Natural History in Latin. It is one of the permanent classical treasures of the world. And if any scientific man thinks his labours are worth the world's attention, let him, also, write what he has to say in Latin, finishedly and exquisitely, if it take him a month to a page.* But if — which, unless he be one chosen of millions, is assur- edly the fact — his lucubrations are only of local and tempo- rary consequence, let him write, as clearly as he can, in his native language. This book, accordingly, I have written in English ; (not, by the way, that I could have written it in anything else — so there are small thanks to me) ; and one of its purposes is to inter- pret, for young English readers, the necessary European Latin or Greek names of flowers, and to make them vivid and vital to their understandings. But two great difficulties occur in doing this. The first, that there are generally from three or four, up to two dozen, Latin names current for every flower ; and every new botanist thinks his eminence only to be prop- erly asserted by adding another. The second, and a much more serious one, is of the Devils own contriving — (and remember I am always quite serious when I speak of the Devil,) — namely, that the most current and authoritative names are apt to be founded on some un- clean or debasing association, so that to interpret them is to defile the reader's mind. I will give no instance ; too many will, at once occur to any learned reader, and the unlearned I need not vex with so much as one : but, in such cases, since I could only take refuge in the untranslated word by leaving other Greek or Latin words also untranslated, and the nomen- clature still entirely senseless, — and I do not choose to do this, — there is only one other course open to me, namely, to substitute boldly, to my own pupils, other generic names for the plants thus faultfully hitherto titled. As I do not do this for my own pride, but honestly for my * I have by happy chance just added to my Oxford library the poet Gray's copy of Linnaeus, with its exquisitely written Latin notes, exem- plary alike to scholar and naturalist. INTRODUCTION. 9 reader's service, I neither question nor care how far the emen- dations I propose may be now or hereafter adopted. I shall not even name the cases in which they have been made for the serious reason above specified ; but even shall mask those which there was real occasion to alter, by sometimes giving new names in cases where there was no necessity of such kind. Doubtless I shall be accused of doing myself what I violently blame in others. I do so ; but with a different motive — of which let the reader judge as he is disposed. The practical result will be that the children who learn botany on the sys- tem adopted in this book will know the useful and beautiful names of plants hitherto given, in all languages ; the useless and ugly ones they will not know. And they will have to learn one Latin name for each plant, which,. when differing from the common one, I trust may yet by some scientific per- sons be accepted, and with ultimate advantage. The learning of the one Latin name — as, for instance, Gra- men striatum — I hope will be accurately enforced always ; — but not less carefully the learning of the pretty English one — "Ladielace Grass" — with due observance that " Ladies' laces hath leaves like unto Millet in fashion with many white vaines or ribs, and silver strakes running along through the middest of the leaves, fashioning the same like to laces of white and green silk, very beautiful and faire to behold." I have said elsewhere, and can scarcely repeat too often, that a day will come when men of science will think their names disgraced, instead of honoured, by being used to bar- barise nomenclature ; I hope therefore that my own name may be kept well out of the way ; but, having been privileged to found the School of Art in the University of Oxford, I think that I am justified in requesting any scientific writers who may look kindly upon this book, to add such of the names suggested in it as they think deserving of acceptance, to their own lists of synonyms, under the head of "Schol. Art. Oxon." The difficulties thrown in the way of any quiet private student by existing nomenclature may be best illustrated by my simply stating what happens to myself in endeavouring 10 INTRODUCTION. to use the page above facsimile'cl. Not knowing how far St. Bruno's Lily might be connected with my own pet one, and not having any sufficient book on Swiss botany, I take down Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Plants, (a most useful book, as far as any book in the present state of the science can be useful,) and find, under the head of Anthericum, the Savoy Lily in- deed, but only the following general information :— " 809. Anthericum. A name applied by the Greeks to the stem of the asphodel, and not misapplied to this set of plants, which in some sort resemble the asphodel. Plants with fleshy leaves, and spikes of bright yellow flowers, easily cultivated if kept dry." Hunting further, I find again my Savoy lily called a spider- plant, under the article Hemerocallis, and the only informa- tion which the book gives me under Hemerocallis, is that it means c beautiful day' lily; and then, "This is an ornamental genus of the easiest culture. The species are remarkable among border flowers for their fine orange, yellow, or blue flowers. The Hemerocallis coerulea has been considered a distinct genus by Mr. Salisbury, and called Saussurea." As I correct this sheet for press, however, I find that the Heme- rocallis is now to be called ' Funkia,' " in honour of Mr. Funk, a Prussian apothecary." All this while, meantime, I have a suspicion that my pet Savoy Lily is not, in existing classification, an Anthericum, nor a Hemerocallis, but a Lilium. It is, in fact, simply a Turk's cap which doesn't curl up. But on trying ' Lilium ' in Loudon, I find no mention whatever of any wild branched white lily. I then try the next word in my specimen page of Curtis ; but there is no ' Phalangium ' at all in Loudon's index. And now I have neither time nor mind for more search, but will give, in due place, such account as I can of my own dwarf branched lily, which I shall call St. Bruno's, as well as this Liliastrum — no offence to the saint, I hope. For it grows very gloriously on the limestones of Savoy, presumably, there- fore, at the Grande Chartreuse ; though I did not notice it there, and made a very unmonkish use of it when I gathered INTRODUCTION. 11 it last : — There was a pretty young English lady at the table- v\\ov, 'phyllon.' "The thing that is born," or "put forth." "When the branch is tender, and putteth forth her leaves, ye know that summer is nigh." The botanists say, " The leaf is an expan- sion of the bark of the stem." More accurately, the bark is a contraction of the tissue of the leaf. For every leaf is born out of the earth, and breathes out of the air ; and there are THE LEAF. 33 many leaves that have no stems, but only roots. It is ' the springing thing * ; this thin film of life ; rising, with its edge out of the ground — infinitely feeble, infinitely fair. With Folium, in Latin, is rightly associated the word Flos ; for the flower is only a group of singularly happy leaves. From these two roots come foglio, feuille, feuillage, and fleur ; — blurne, blossom, and bloom ; our foliage, and the borrowed foil, and the connected technical groups of words in archi- tecture and the sciences. 4 This thin film, I said. That is the essential character of a leaf ; to be thin, — widely spread out in proportion to its mass. It is the opening of the substance of the earth to the air, which is the giver of life. The Greeks called it, there- fore, not only the born or blooming thing, but the spread or expanded thing — " 7rera\ov" Pindar calls the beginnings of quarrel, "petals of quarrel." Recollect, therefore, this form, Petalos ; and connect it with Petasos, the expanded cap of Mercury. For one great use of both is to give shade. The root of all these words is said to be IIET (Pet), which may easily be remembered in Greek, as it sometimes occurs in no unpleasant sense in English. 5. But the word ' petalos ' is connected in Greek with an- other word, meaning to fly, — so that you may think of a bird as spreading its petals to the wind ; and with another, signi- fying Fate in its pursuing flight, the overtaking thing, or overflying Fate. Finally, there is another Greek word mean- ing 'wide,' 7r\aTvs (platys) ; whence at last our* plate' — a thing made broad or extended — but especially made broad or ■ flat ' out of the solid, as in a lump of clay extended on the wheel, or a lump of metal extended by the hammer. So the first we call Platter ; the second Plate, when of the precious metals. Then putting b for p, and d for t, we get the blade of an oar, and blade of grass. 6. Now gather a branch of laurel, and look at it carefully. You may read the history of the being of half the earth in one of those green oval leaves — the things that the sun and the rivers have made out of dry ground. Daphne — daughter of Enipeus, and beloved by the Sun,— that fable gives you at Vol. I. — 3 84 PROSERPINA. once the two great facts about vegetation. "Where warmth is. and moisture — there also, the leaf. Where no warmth — there is no leaf ; where there is no dew— no leaf. 7. Look, then, to the branch you hold in your hand. That you can so hold it, or make a crown of it, if you choose, is the first thing I want you to note of it ; — the proportion of size, namely, between the leaf and you. Great part of your life and character, as a human creature, has depended on that. Suppose all leaves had been spacious, like some palm leaves ; solid, like cactus stem ; or that trees had grown, as they might of course just as easily have grown, like mushrooms, all one great cluster of leaf round one stalk. I do not say that they are divided into small leaves only for your delight, or your service, as if you were the monarch of everything — even in this atom of a globe. You are made of your proper size ; and the leaves of theirs : for reasons, and by laws, of which neither the leaves nor you know anything. Only note the harmony between both, and the joy we may have in this di- vision and mystery of the frivolous and tremulous petals, which break the light and the breeze, — compared to what, with the frivolous and the tremulous mind which is in us, we could have had out of domes, or penthouses, or walls of leaf. 8. Secondly ; think awhile of its dark clear green, and the good of it to you. Scientifically, you know green in leaves is owing to ' chlorophyll/ or, in English, to ' green-leaf.' It may be very fine to know that ; but my advice to you, on the whole, is to rest content wdth the general fact that leaves are green when they do not grow in or near smoky towns ; and not by any means to rest content with the fact that very soon there will not be a green leaf in England, but only greenish-black ones. And thereon resolve that you will yourself endeavour to promote the growing of the green wood, rather than of the black. 9. Looking at the back of your laurel-leaves, you see how the central rib or spine of each, and the lateral branchings, strengthen and carry it. I find much confused use, in botani- cal works, of the words Vein and Rib. For, indeed, there are veins in the ribs of leaves, as marrow in bones ; and the pro- Plate II. — Central Type of Leaves. Common Bay Laurel. THE LEAF. 35 jecting bars often gradually depress themselves into a trans- parent net of rivers. But the mechanical force of the framework in carrying the leaf -tissue is the point first to be noticed ; it is that which admits, regulates, or restrains the visible motions of the leaf ; while the system of circulation can only be stud- ied through the microscope. But the ribbed leaf bears itself to the wind, as the webbed foot of a bird does to the water, and needs the same kind, though not the same strength, of support ; and its ribs always are partly therefore constituted of strong woody substance, which is knit out of the tissue ; and you can extricate this skeleton framework, and keep it, after the leaf-tissue is dissolved. So I shall henceforward speak simply of the leaf and its ribs, — only specifying the ad- ditional veined structure on necessary occasions. 10. I have just said that the ribs — and might have said, farther, the stalk that sustains them — are knit out of the tissue of the leaf. But what is the leaf tissue itself knit out of ? One would think that was nearly the first thing to be discovered^ or at least to be thought of, concerning plants, — namely, how and of what they are made. We say they 1 grow. ' But you know that they can't grow out of nothing ; — this solid wood and rich tracery must be made out of some previously existing substance. What is the substance ? — and how is it woven into leaves, — twisted into wood ? 11. Consider how fast this is done, in spring. You walk in February over a slippery field, where, through hoar-frost and mud, you perhaps hardly see the small green blades of trampled turf. In twelve weeks you wade through the same field up to your knees in fresh grass ; and in a week or two more, you mow two or three solid haystacks off it. In winter you walk by your currant-bush, or your vine. They are shrivelled sticks — like bits of black tea in the canister. You pass again in May, and the currant-bush looks like a young sycamore tree ; and the vine is a bower : and meanwhile the forests, all over this side of the round world, have grown their foot or two in height, with new leaves — so much deeper, so much denser than they were. Where has it all come from ? Cut off the fresh shoots from a single branch of 36 PROSERPINA. any tree in May. Weigh them ; and then consider that so much weight has been added to every such living branch, everywhere, this side the equator, within the last two months. What is all that made of ? 12. Well, this much the botanists really know, and tell us, ■ — It is made chiefly of the breath of animals ; that is to say, of the substance which, during the past year, animals have breathed into the air ; and which, if they went on breathing, and their breath were not made into trees, w r ould poison them, or rather suffocate them, as people are suffocated in, uncleansed pits, and dogs in the Grotta del Cane. So that you may look upon the grass and forests of the earth as a kind of green hoar-frost, frozen upon it from our breath, as, on the window-panes, the white arborescence of ice. 13. But how is it made into wood ? The substances that have been breathed into the air are charcoal, with oxygen and hydrogen, — or, more plainly, char- coal and water. Some necessary earths, — in smaller quantity, but absolutely essential, — the trees get from the ground ; but, I believe all the charcoal they want, and most of the water, from the air. Now the question is, where and how do they take it in, and digest it into wood ? 14. You know, in spring, and partly through all the year, except in frost, a liquid called ' sap ' circulates in trees, of which the nature, one should have thought, might have been ascertained by mankind in the six thousand years they have been cutting wood. Under the impression always that it had been ascertained, and that I could at any time know all about it, I have put off till to-day, 19th October, 1869, when I am past fifty, the knowing anything about it at all. But I w T ill really endeavour now to ascertain something, and take to my botanical books, accordingly, in due order. (1) Dresser's "Budiments of Botany." ' Sap ' not in the index ; only Samara, and Sarcocarp, — about neither of which I feel the smallest curiosity. (2) Figuier's "Histoire des Plantes."* 'Seve,' not in index; only Serpolet, and She- rardia arvensis, which also have no help in them for me. * An excellent book, nevertheless. THE LEAF. 37 (3) Balfour's " Manual of Botany." < Sap/— yes, at last. " Ar- ticle 257. Course of fluids in exogenous stems." I don't care about the course just now : I want to know where the fluids come from. 4 'If a plant be plunged into a weak solution of acetate of lead," — I don't in the least want to know what hap- pens. "From the minuteness of the tissue, it is not easy to determine the vessels through which the sap moves." Who said it was ? If it had been easy, I should have done it my- self. " Changes take place in the composition of the sap in its upward course." I dare say ; but I don't know yet what its composition is before it begins going up. " The Elabor- ated Sap by Mr. Schultz has been called c latex.' " I wish Mr. Schultz were in a hogshead of it, with the top on. " On ac- count of these movements in the latex, the laticiferous vessels have been denominated cinenchymatous." I do not venture to print the expressions which I here mentally make use of. 15. Stay, — here, at last, in Article 264, is something to the purpose : "It appears then that, in the case of Exogenous plants, the fluid matter in the soil, containing different sub- stances in solution, is sucked up by the extremities of the roots." Yes, but how of the pine trees on yonder rock ? — Is there any sap in the rock, or water either? The moisture must be seized during actual rain on the root, or stored up from the snow ; stored up, any way, in a tranquil, not actively sappy, state, till the time comes for its change, of which there is no account here. 16. I have only one chance left now. Lindley's "Introduc- tion to Botany." 'Sap,' — yes, — ' General motion of.' II. 325. " The course which is taken by the sap, after entering a plant, is the first subject for consideration." My dear doctor, I have learned nearly whatever I know of plant structure from you, and am grateful ; and that it is little, is not your fault, but mine. But this — let me say it with all sincere respect — is not what you should have told me here. You know, far better than I, that ■ sap ' never does enter a plant at all ; but only salt, or earth and water, and that the roots alone could not make it ; and that, therefore, the course of it must be, in great part, the result or process of the actual making. But I 38 PROSERPINA. will read now, patiently ; for I know you will tell me much that is worth hearing, though not perhaps what I want. Yes ; now that I have read Lindley's statement carefully, I find it is full of precious things ; and this is what, with think- ing over it, I can gather for you. 17. First, towards the end of January, — as the light en- larges, and the trees revive from their rest, — there is a gen- eral liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius in their stems ; and I suppose there is really a great deal of moisture rapidly absorbed from the earth in most cases ; and that this absorp- tion is a great help to the sun in drying the winter's damp out of it for us : then, with that strange vital power, — which sci- entific people are usually as afraid of naming as common peo- ple are afraid of naming -Death, — the tree gives the gathered earth and water a changed existence ; and to this new-born liquid an upward motion from the earth, as our blood ha3 from the heart ; for the life of the tree is out of the earth ; and this upward motion has a mechanical power in pushing on the growth. " Forced onward by the current of sap, the plumule ascends," (Lindley, p. 132,) — this blood of the tree having to supply, exactly as our own blood has, not only the forming powers of substance, but a continual evaporation, " approximately seventeen times more than that of the human body," while the force of motion in the sap " is sometimes five times greater than that which impels the blood in the crural artery of the horse." 18. Hence generally, 1 think we may conclude thus much, — that at every pore of its surface, under ground and above, the plant in the spring absorbs moisture, which instantly dis- perses itself through its whole system " by means of some permeable quality of the membranes of the cellular tissue in- visible to oar eyes even by the most powerful glasses " (p. 326) ; that in this way subjected to the vital power of the tree, it becomes sap, properly so called, which passes downwards through this cellular tissue, slowly and secretly ; and then up- wards, through the great vessels of the tree, violently, stretch- ing out the supple twigs of it as you see a flaccid waterpipe swell and move when the cock is turned to fill it. And the THE LEAF. 39 tree becomes literally a fountain, of which the springing streamlets are clothed with new-woven garments of green tis- sue, and of which the silver spray stays in the sky, — a spray, now, of leaves. 19. That is the gist of the matter ; and a very wonderful gist it is, to my mind. The secret and subtle descent — the violent and exulting resilience of the tree's blood, — what guides it ? — what compels ? The creature has no heart to beat like ours ; one cannot take refuge from the mystery in a 'muscular contraction.' Fountain without supply — playing by its own force, for ever rising and falling all through the days of Spring, spending itself at last in gathered clouds of leaves, and iris of blossom. Very wonderful ; and it seems, for the present, that we know nothing whatever about its causes ; nay, the strangeness of the reversed arterial and vein motion, without a heart, does not not seem to strike anybody. Perhaps, however, it may interest you, as I observe it does the botanists, to know that the cellular tissue through which the motion is effected is called Parenchym, and the woody tissue, Bothrenchym ; and that Parenchym is divided, by a system of nomenclature which " has some advantages over that more commonly in use," * into merenchyma, conenchyma, ovenchyma, atractenchyma, cylindrenchyma, colpenchyma, cladenchyma, and prismen- chyma. 20. Take your laurel branch into your hand again. There are, as you must well know, innumerable shapes and orders of leaves ; — there are some like claws ; some like fingers, and some like feet ; there are endlessly cleft ones, and endlessly clustered ones, and inscrutable divisions within divisions of the fretted verdure ; and wrinkles, and ripples, and stitch- ings, and hemmings, and pinchings, and gatherings, and crumplings, and clippings, and what not. But there is noth- ing so constantly noble as the pure leaf of the laurel, bay, orange, and olive ; numerable, sequent, perfect in setting, * Lindley, 'Introduction to Botany,' vol. i. , p. 21. The terms u wholly obsolete " says an authoritative botanic friend. Thank Heaven ! 40 PROSERPINA. divinely simple and serene. I shall call these noble leaves ' Apolline ' leaves. They characterize many orders of plants, great arid small, — from the magnolia to the myrtle, and ex- quisite ' myrtille ' of the hills, (bilberry) ; but wherever you find them, strong, lustrous, dark green, simply formed, richly scented or stored, — you have nearly always kindly and lovely vegetation, in healthy ground and air. 21. The gradual diminution in rank beneath the Apolline leaf, takes place in others by the loss of one or more of the qualities above named. The Apolline leaf, I said, is strong, lustrous, full in its green, rich in substance, simple in form. The inferior leaves are those which have lost strength, and become thin, like paper ; which have lost lustre, and become dead by roughness of surface, like the nettle, — (an Apolline leaf may become dead by bloom, like the olive, yet not lose beauty) ; which have lost colour and become feeble in green, as in the poplar, or crudely bright, like rice ; which have lost substance and softness, and have nothing to give in scent or nourishment ; or become flinty or spiny ; finally, which have lost simplicity, and become cloven or jagged. Many of these losses are partly atoned for by gain of some peculiar loveliness. Grass and moss, and parsley and fern, have each their own delightfulness ; yet they are all of inferior power and honour, compared to the Apolline leaves. 22. You see, however, that though your laurel leaf has a central stem, and traces of ribs branching from it, in a verte- brated manner, they are so faint that we cannot take it for a type of vertebrate structure. But the two figures of elm and alisma leaf, given in Modern Painters (vol. iii.), and now here repeated, Fig. 3, will clearly enough show the opposition be- tween this vertebrate form, branching again usually at the edges, a, and the softly opening lines diffused at the stem, and gathered at the point of the leaf, b, which, as you almost with- out doubt know already, are characteristic of a vast group of plants, including especially all the lilies, grasses, and palms, which for the most part are the signs of local or temporary moisture in hot countries ; — local, as of fountains and streams ; temporary, as of rain or inundation, THE LEAF. 41 But temporary, still more definitely in the clay, than in the year. When you go out, delighted, into the dew of the morn- ing, have you ever considered why it is so rich upon the grass ; — why it is not upon the trees ? It is partly on the trees, but yet your memory of it will be always chiefly of its gleam upon the lawn. On many trees you will find there is none at all, I cannot follow out here the many inquiries connected with this subject, but, broadly, remember the branched trees are fed chiefly by rain, — the unbranched ones by dew, visible or invisible ; that is to say, at all events by moisture which they can gather for themselves out of the air ; or else by streams and springs. Hence the division of the verse of the song of Moses : "My doctrine shall drop as the rain ; my speech shall distil as the dew : as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." 23. Next, examining the direction of the veins in the leaf of the alisma, 6, Fig. 3, you see they all open widely, as soon as they can, towards the thick part of the leaf ; and then taper, apparently with reluctance, pushing each other outwards, to the point. If the leaf were a lake of the same shape, and its stem the entering river, the lines of the currents passing through b Fig. 3. 42 PROSERPINA. it would, I believe, be nearly the same as that of the veins in the aquatic leaf. I have not examined the fluid law accurately, and I do not suppose there is more real correspondence than may be caused by the leaf's expanding in every permitted di- rection, as the water would, with all the speed it can ; but the resemblance is so close as to enable you to fasten the relation of the unbranched leaves to streams more distinctly in your mind, — just as the toss of the palm leaves from their stem may, I think, in their likeness to the springing of a fountain, remind you of their relation to the desert, and their necessity, therein, to life of man and beast. 24. And thus, associating these grass and lily leaves always with fountains, or with dew, I think we may get a pretty gen- eral name for them also. You know that Cora, our Madonna of the flowers, was lost in Sicilian Fields : you know, also, that the fairest of Greek fountains, lost in Greece, was thought to rise in a Sicilian islet ; and that the real springing of the noble fountain in that rock was one of the causes which deter- mined the position of the greatest Greek city of Sicily. So I think, as we call the fairest branched leaves ' Apolline,' we will call the fairest flowing ones 'Arethusan.' But remember that the Apolline leaf represents only the central type of land leaves, and is, within certain limits, of a fixed form ; while the beau- tiful Arethusan leaves, alike in flowing of their lines, change their forms indefinitely, — some shaped like round pools, and some like winding currents, and many like arrows, and many like hearts, and otherwise varied and variable, as leaves ought to be, — that rise out of the waters, and float amidst the paus- ing of their foam. 25. Brantwood, Easier Day, 1875. — I don't like to spoil my pretty sentence, above ; but on reading it over, I suspect I wrote it confusing the water-lily leaf, and other floating ones of the same kind, with the Arethusan forms. But the water- lily and water-ranunculus leaves, and such others, are to the orders of earth-loving leaves what ducks and swans are to birds ; (the swan is the water-lily of birds ; ) they are swim- ming leaves ; not properly watery creatures, or able to live under water like fish, (unless when dormant), but just like TEE LEAF, 43 birds that pass their lives on the surface of the waves — though they must breathe in the air. And these natant leaves, as they lie on the water surface, do not want strong ribs to carry them,* but have very delicate ones beautifully branching into the orbed space, to keep the tissue nice and flat ; while, on the other hand, leaves that really have to grow under water, sacrifice their tissue, and keep only their ribs, like coral animals ; (' Eanunculus hetero- phyllus,' ' other-leaved Frog-flower/ and its like,) just as, if you keep your own hands too long in water, they shrivel at the finger-ends. 26. So that you must not attach any great botanical impor- tance to the characters of contrasted aspects in leaves, which I wish you to express by the words ' Apolline ' and ' Arethusan ' ; but their mythic importance is very great, and your careful observance of it will help you completely to understand the beautiful Greek fable of Apollo and Daphne. There are in- deed several Daphnes, and the first root of the name is far away in another field of thought altogether, connected with the Gods of Light. But etymology, the best of servants, is an unreasonable master ; and Professor Max Miiller trusts his deep-reaching knowledge of the first ideas connected with the names of Athena and Daphne, too implicitly, when he sup- poses this idea to be retained in central Greek theology. ■ Athena • originally meant only the dawn, among nations who knew nothing of a Sacred Spirit. But the Athena who catches Achilles by the hair, and urges the spear of Diomed, has not, in the mind of Homer, the slightest remaining connection with the mere beauty of daybreak. Daphne chased by Apollo, may perhaps — though I doubt even this much of consistence in the earlier myth — have meant the Dawn pursued by the Sun. But there is no trace whatever of this first idea left in the fable of Arcadia and Thessaly. 27. The central Greek Daphne is the daughter of one of the great river gods of Arcadia ; her mother is the Earth. * M You should see the girders on under-side of the Victoria Water- lily, the most wonderful bit of engineering, of the kind, I know of."-> (' Botanical friend.') 44 PROSERPINA. Now Arcadia is the Oberlancl of Greece ; and the crests of Cyllene, Prynianthus, and Msenalus* surround it, like the Swiss forest cantons, with walls of rock, and shadows of pine. And it divides itself, like the Oberland, into three regions : first, the region of rock and snow, sacred to Mercury and Apollo, in which Mercury's birth on Cyllene, his construction of the lyre, and his stealing the oxen of Apollo, are all expres- sions of the enchantments of cloud and sound, mingling with the sunshine, on the cliffs of Cyllene. " While the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of his instrument." Then came the pine region, sacred especially to Pan and Maenalus the son of Lycaon and brother of Callisto ; and you had better remember this relationship carefully, for the sake of the meaning of the constellations of Ursa Major and the Mons Maenalius, and of their wolf and bear traditions ; (compare also the strong impression on the Greek mind of the wild leanness, nourished by snow, of the Boeotian Cith- aeron, — " Oh, thou lake-hollow, full of divine leaves, and of wild creatures, nurse of the snow, darling of Diana, " (Phce- nissae, 801). How wild the climate of this pine region is, you may judge from the pieces in the note below f out of * Roughly, Cyllene 7,700 feet high ; Erymanthus 7,000; Mamalus 6,000. f March 3rd — We now ascend the roots of the mountain called Kas- tania, and begin to pass between it and the mountain of Alonistena, which is on our right. The latter is much higher than Kastania, and, like the other peaked summits of the MaBiialian range, is covered with firs, and deeply at present with snow. The snow lies also in our pass. At a fountain in the road, the small village of Bazeniko is half a mile on the right, standing at the foot of the Maenalian range, and now cov- ered with snow. Saeta is the most lofty of the range of mountains, which are in face of Levidhi, to the northward and eastward ; they are all a part of the chain which extends from Mount Khelmos, and connects that great sum- mit with Artemisium, Parthenium, and Parnon. Mount Saeta is cov- THE LEAF. 45 Colonel Leake's diary in crossing the Msenalian range in spring. And then, lastly, you have the laurel and vine region, full of sweetness and Elysian beauty. 28. Now as Mercury is the ruling power of the hill en- chantment, so Daphne of the leafy peace. She is, in her first life, the daughter of the mountain river, the mist of it filling the valley ; the Sun, pursuing, and effacing it, from dell to dell, is, literally, Apollo pursuing Daphne, and adverse to her ; (not, as in the earlier tradition, the Sun pursuing only his own light). Daphne, thus hunted, cries to her mother, the Earth, which opens, and receives her, causing the laurel to spring up in her stead. That is to say, wherever the rocks protect the mist from the sunbeam, and suffer it to Water the earth, there the laurel and other richest vegetation fill the hollows, giving a better glory to the sun itself. For sunshine, on the torrent spray, on the grass of its valley, and entangled among the laurel stems, or glancing from their leaves, be- came a thousandfold lovelier and more sacred than the same sunbeams, burning on the leafless mountain -side. And farther, the leaf, in its connection with the river, is typically expressive, not, as the flower was, of human fading and passing away, but of the perpetual flow and renewal of human mind and thought, rising u like the rivers that run among the hills " ; therefore it was that the youth of Greece ered with firs. The mountain between the plain of Levfdhi and Alo- nfstena, or, to speak by the ancient nomenclature, that part of the Mob- nalian range which separates the Orchomenia from the valleys of Helisson and Methydrium, is clothed also with large forests of the same trees ; the road across this ridge from Levidhi to Alonlstena is now impractica- ble on account of the snow. I am detained all day at Levfdhi by a heavy fall of snow, which before the evening has covered the ground to halC afoot in depth, although the village is not much elevated above the plain, nor in a more lofty situa- tion than Tripolitza. March Mil. — Yesterday afternoon and during the night the snow fell in such quantities as to cover all the plains and adjacent mountains; and the country exhibited this morning as fine a snow-scene as Norway could supply. As the day advanced and the sun appeared, the snow melted rapidly, but the sky was soon overcast again, and the snow began to fall. 46 PROSERPINA. sacrificed their hair — the sign of their continually renewed strength, — to the rivers, and to Apollo. Therefore, to com- memorate Apollo's own chief victory over death — over Python, the corrupter, — a laurel branch was gathered every ninth year in the vale of Tempe ; and the laurel leaf became the reward or crown of all beneficent and enduring work of man — work of inspiration, born of the strength of the earth, and of the dew of heaven, and which can never pass away. 29. You may doubt at first, even because of its grace, this meaning in the fable of Apollo and Daphne ; you will not doubt it, however, when you trace it back to its first eastern origin. "When we speak carelessly of the traditions respect- ing the Garden of Eden, (or in Hebrew, remember, Garden of Delight,) we are apt to confuse Milton's descriptions with those in the book of Genesis. Milton fills his Paradise with flowers ; but no flowers are spoken of in Genesis. We may indeed conclude that in speaking of every herb of the field, flowers are included. But they are not named. The things that are named in the Garden of Delight are trees only. The words are, " every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food ; " and as if to mark the idea more strongly for us in the Septuagint, even the ordinary Greek word for tree is not used, but the word £v\ov, — literally, every ' wood/ every piece of timber that was pleasant or good. They are in- deed the " vivi travi," — living rafters of Dante's Apennine. Do you remember how those trees were said to be watered ? Not by the four rivers only. The rivers could not supply the place of rain. No rivers do ; for in truth they are the refuse of rain. No storm-clouds were there, nor hidings of the blue by darkening veil ; but there w T ent up a mist from the earth, and watered the face of the ground, — or, as in Septuagint and Vulgate, " There went forth a fountain from the earth, and gave the earth to drink." 30. And now, lastly, we continually think of that Garden of Delight, as if it existed, or could exist, no longer ; w T holly forgetting that it is spoken of in Scripture as perpetually existent ; and some of its fairest trees as existent also, or only recently destroyed. When Ezekiel is describing to Pharaoh THE LEAF, 4? the greatness of the Assyrians, do you remember what image he gives of them ? " Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon, with fair branches ; and his top was among the thick boughs ; the waters nourished him, and the deep brought him up, with her rivers running round about his plants. Under his branches did all the beasts of the field bring forth their young ; and under his shadow dwelt all great nations." 31. Now hear what follows. "The cedars in the Garden of God could not hide him. The fir trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not like his branches ; nor any tree in the Garden of God was like unto him in beauty." So that you see, whenever a nation rises into consistent, vital, and, through many generations, enduring power, there is sfcill the Garden of God ; still it is the water of life which feeds the roots of it ; and still the succession of its people is imaged by the perennial leafage of trees of Paradise. Could this be said of Assyria, and shall it not be said of England ? How much more, of lives such as ours should be, — just, labo- rious, united in a'm, beneficent in fulfilment, may the image be used of the leaves of the trees of Eden ! Other symbols have been given often to show the evanescence and slightness of our lives — the foam upon the water, the grass on the house- top, the vapour that vanishes away ; yet none of these are images of true human life. That life, when it is real, is not evanescent ; is not slight ; does not vanish away. Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven for ever in the work of the world ; by so much, evermore, the strength of the human race has gained ; more stubborn in the root, higher towards heaven in the branch ; and, " as a teil tree, and as an oak, — whose substance is in them when they cast their leaves, — so the holy seed is in the midst thereof." 32. Only remember on what conditions. In the great Psalm of life, we are told that everything that a man doeth shall prosper, so only that he delight in the law of his God, that he hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor sat in the seat of the scornful. Is it among these leaves of the perpetual Spring, — helpful leaves for the healing of the na- 48 PROSERPINA. tions,— that we mean to have our part and place, or rathet among the " brown skeletons of leaves that lag, the forest brook along " ? For other leaves there are, and other streams that water them, — not water of life, but water of Acheron, Autumnal leaves there are that strew the brooks, in Vallom- brosa. Remember you how the name of the place was changed : " Once called 'Sweet water' (Aqua bella), now, the Shadowy Vale." Portion in one or other name we must choose, all of us, with the living olive, by the living fountains of waters, or with the wild fig trees, whose leafage of human soul is strewed along the brooks of death, in the eternal Vallombrosa, CHAPTER IV. THE FLOWER. Rome, Whit Monday, 1874. 1. On the quiet road leading from under the Palatine to the little church of St. Nereo and Achilleo, I met, yesterday morn- ing, group after group of happy peasants heaped in pyramids on their triumphal carts, in Whit-Sunday dress, stout and clean, and gay in colour ; and the women all with bright arti- ficial roses in their hair, set with true natural taste, and well becoming them. This power of arranging wreath or crown of flowers for the head, remains to the people from classic times. And the thing that struck me most in the look of it w r as not so much the cheerfulness, as the dignity ; — in a true sense, the becomingness and decorousness of the ornament. Among the ruins of the dead city, and the worse desolation of the work of its modern rebuilders, here was one element at least of honour, and order ; — and, in these, of delight. And these are the real significances of the flower itself. It is the utmost purification of the plant, and the utmost disci- pline. Where its tissue is blanched fairest, dyed purest, set in strictest rank, appointed to most chosen office, there — and created by the fact of this purity and function — is the flower. 2. But created, observe, by the purity and order, more than by the function. The flower exists for its own sake — not THE FLOWER. 49 for the fruit's sake. The production of the fruit is an added honour to it — is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed, — not the seed of the flower. You are fond of cherries, perhaps ; and think that the use of cherry blossom is to produce cherries. Not at all. The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossoms ; just as the use of bulbs is to produce hyacinths, — not of hyacinths to produce bulbs. Nay, that the flower can multiply by bulb, or root, or slip, as well as by seed, may show you at once how immaterial the seed-forming function is to the flower's existence. A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the mineral. "Dust of sapphire," writes my friend Dr. John Brown to me, of the wood hyacinths of Scot- land in the spring. Yes, that is so,— each bud more beauti- ful, itself, than perfectest jewel— this, indeed, jewel "of purest ray serene ; " but, observe you, the glory is in the purity, the serenit} 7 , the radiance, — not in the mere continu- ance of the creature. 3. It is because of its beauty that its continuance is worth Heaven's while. The glory of it is in being, — not in beget- ting ; and in the spirit and substance, — not the change. For the earth also has its flesh and spirit. Every clay of spring is the earth's Whit Sunday — Fire Sunday. The falling fire of the rainbow, with the order of its zones, and the gladness of its covenant, — you may eat of it, like Esdras ; but you feed upon it only that you may see it. Do you think that flowers were born to nourish the blind ? Fasten well in your mind, then, the conception of order, and purity, as the essence of the flower's being, no less than of the crystal's. A ruby is not made bright to scatter round it child-rubies ; nor a flower, but in collateral and added honour, to give birth to other flowers. Two main facts, then, you have to study in every flower : the symmetry or order of it, and the perfection of its sub- stance ; first, the manner in which the leaves are placed for beauty of form ; then the spinning and weaving and blanch- ing of their tissue, for the reception of purest colour, or re- fining to richest surface. Vol. 1.-4 50 PROSERPINA. 4. First, the order : the proportion, and answering to each other, of the parts ; for the study of which it becomes neces- sary to know what its parts are ; and that a flower consists essentially of — Well, I really don't know what it consists es- sentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks, and tor uses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at all, seemingly ; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no tor uses, and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or pistils, — only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one doesn't call them flowers ; they get together in knots, and one calls them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether ; — I haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blos- som is like ; only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's, ' cupola ' ; and that is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down, which hold nothing — less than nothing, — large extinguishers of the flame of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrass- ment, a flower not only is without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely consists, alone, of itself. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower ; but a hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 6 a heather ' ; when one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom, — because heath-bells, though they grow together for com- pany's sake, do so in a voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places ; and yet, they depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes. 5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, is that most subtle part of their order, and the most difficult to represent. Take the cluster of bog-heather bells, for in- stance, Line- study 1. You might think at first there were no lines in it worth study ; but look at it more carefully. There are twelve bells in the cluster. There may be fewer, or more ; but the bog-heath is apt to run into something near that THE FLOWER. 51 number. They all grow together as close as they can, and on one side of the supporting branch only. The natural effect would be to bend the branch down ; but the branch won't have that, and so leans back to carry them. Now you see the use of drawing the profile in the middle figure : it shows you the exactly balanced setting of the group, — not drooping, nor erect ; but with a disposition to droop, tossed up by the leaning back of the stem. Then, growing as near as they can to each other, those in the middle get squeezed. Here is an- other quite special character. Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all (fancy a squeezed convolvulus !) ; but these heather bells like it, and look all the prettier for it, — not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but the cluster alto- gether, by their patience. Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star- shape, and in front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green cluster of sharp leaves that hold them ; all this order being as essential to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself. 6. But the bog-heath has usually only one cluster of flowers to arrange on each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontis- piece), and you will find that the richest piece of Gothic spire- sculpture would be dull and graceless beside the grouping of the floral masses in their various life. But it is difficult to give the accuracy of attention necessary to see their beauty without drawing them ; and still more difficult to draw them in any approximation to the truth before they change. This is indeed the fatallest obstacle to all good botanical work. Flowers, or leaves, — and especially the last, — can only be rightly drawn as they grow. And even then, in their loveliest spring action, they grow as you draw them, and will not stay quite the same creatures for half an hour. 7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, § 107, that real botany is not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom itmlf is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if well. The grouping given to the various states of form between bud 52 PROSERPINA. and flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant ; and in the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or symbolisms, connected with its ex- istence. The utter loss and far scattered ruin of the cistus and wild rose, — the dishonoured and dark contortion of the convolvulus, — the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apen- nine, are strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each making of themselves a little cross as they die ; and so enduring into the days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know 7 not which is the more beautiful. 8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered company, is the first and most subtle condition of form in flowers ; and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined grouping, but the wayward and ac- cidental. Don't confuse the beautiful consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness of a foxglove, — though that also has its divinity ; but of another kind. That legal order of blossoming — for which we may wisely keep the accepted name, 'inflorescence,' — is itself quite a sepa- rate subject of study, which we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set over the flower itself. 9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on the palace of the Caesars. It is an in- tensely simple, intensely floral, flower. All silk and flame : a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower absolute ; inside and outside, all flower. No sparing of colour anywhere — no outside coarsenesses — no interior secrecies ; open as the sunshine that creates it ; fine-finished on both sides, down to the extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk ; and robed in the purple of the Caesars. Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards 'from the spot where I gathered the weed of its desolation. THE FLOWER 53 10. A pure cup, you remember it is ; that much at least you cannot but remember, of poppy-form among the corn- fields ; and it is best, in beginning, to think of every flower as essentially a cup. There are flat ones, but you will find that most of these are really groups of flowers, not single blos- soms ; and there are out of-the-way and quaint ones, very dif- ficult to define as of any shape ; but even these have a cup to begin with, deep down in them. You had better take the idea of a cup or vase, as the first, simplest, and most general form of true flower. The botanists call it a corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown ; and the Word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel ; that it is essentially a re volute form — a whirl or (botanically) c whorl ' of leaves ; in reality successive round the base of the urn they form. 11. Perhaps, however, you think poppies in general are not much like cups. But the flower in my hand is a — poverty- stricken poppy, I was going to write, poverty -strengthened poppy, I mean. On richer ground, it would have gushed into flaunting breadth of untenable purple — flapped its incon- sistent scarlet vaguely to the wind — dropped the pride of its petals over my hand in an hour after I gathered it. But this little rough-bred thing, a Campagna pony of a poppy, is as bright and strong to-day as yesterday. So that I can see ex- actly where the leaves join or lap over each other ; and when I look down into the cup, find it to be composed of iour leaves altogether, — two smaller, set within two larger. 12. Thus far (and somewhat farther) I had written in Rome ; but now, putting my work together in Oxford, a sud- den doubt troubles me, whether all poppies have two petals smaller then the other two. Whereupon I take down an ex- cellent little school-book on botany — the best I've yet found, thinking to be told quickly ; and I find a great deal about opium ; and, apropos of opium, that the juice of common cel- andine is of a bright orange colour ; and I pause for a bewil- dered five minutes, wondering if a celandine is a poppy, and how many petals it has : going on again — because I must, 54 PROSERPINA. without making up my mind, on either question — I am told to " observe the floral receptacle of the Californian genus Esch- scholtzia." Now I can't observe anything of the sort, and I don't want to ; and I wish California and all that's in it were at the deepest bottom of the Pacific. Next I am told to com- pare the poppy and waterlily ; and I can't do that, neither — though I should like to ; and there's the end of the article ; and it never tells me whether one pair of petals is always smaller than the other, or not. Only I see it says the corolla has four petals. Perhaps a celandine may be a double poppy, and have eight, I know they're tiresome irregular things, and I mustn't be stopped by them ; * — at any rate, my Koman poppy knew what it was about, and had its two couples of leaves in clear subordination, of which at the time I went on to inquire farther, as follows. 13. The next point is, what shape are the petals of ? And that is easier asked than answered ; for when you pull them off, you find they won't lie flat, by Oany means, but are each of them cups, or rather shells, themselves ; and that it requires as much con- chology as would describe a cockle, before you can properly give ac- count of a single poppy leaf. Or of Oa single any leaf — for all leaves are either shells, or boats, (or solid, if A not hollow, masses,) and cannot be represented in flat outline. But, laying these as flat as they will lie on a sheet of paper, you will find the Fig. 4. piece they hide of the paper they lie on can be drawn ; giving approximately the shape of the outer leaf as at A, that of the inner as at B, Fig. 4 ; which you will * Just ill time, finding a heap of gold under an oak tree some thou- sand years old, near Arundel, I've made them out : Eight divided hy three ; that is to say, three couples of petals, with two odd little ones inserted for form's sake. No wonder I couldn't decipher them by m emory. THE FLOWER. 55 find \ery difficult lines to draw, for they are each composed of two curves, joined, as in Fig. 5 ; all above the line a b be- ing the outer edge of the leaf, but joined so subtly to the side that the least break in drawing the line spoils the form. 14. Now every flower petal consists essentially of these two parts, variously proportioned and outlined. It expands from C to a b ; and closes in the external line, and for this reason. Considering every flower under the type of a cup, the first part of the petal is that in which it expands from the bottom to the rim ; the second part, that in which it terminates itself on reaching the rim. Thus let the three circles, ABC, Fig. C Fig. 5. 6., represent the undivided cups of the three great geometrical orders of flowers- — trefoil, quatrefoil and cinquefoil. Draw in the first an equilateral triangle, in the second a square, in the third a pentagon ; draw the dark lines from centres to angles ; (D E P) : then (a) the third part of D ; (b) the fourth part of E, (c) the fifth part of F, are the normal outline forms of the petals of the three families ; the relations between the developing angle and limiting curve being varied according to the depth of cup, and the degree of connection between the petals. Thus a rose folds them over one another, 56 PROSERPINA. in the bud ; a convolvulus twists them, — the one expanding into a flat cinquefoil of separate petals, and the other into a deep- welled cinquefoil of connected ones. I find an excellent illustration in Veronica Polita, one of the most perfectly graceful of field plants because of the light alternate flower stalks, each with its leaf at the base ; the flower itself a quatrefoil, of which the largest and least petals are uppermost. Pull oue off its calyx (draw, if you can, the outline of the striped blue upper petal with the jagged edge n n of pale gold below), and then examine the relative shapes of the lateral, and least upper petal. Their under surface is very cu- rious, as if cov ered with white paint; the blue stripes above, in the di- rection of their growth, deepening the more deli- cate colour with exquisite insistence. A lilac blossom will give you a pretty exam- ple of the expansion of the petals of a quatrefoil above the edge of the cup or tube ; but I must get back to our poppy at present. 15. What outline its petals really have, however, is little shown in their crumpled fluttering ; but that very crumpling arises from a fine floral character which we do not enough value in them. We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower ; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest — nearly all of them — depend on the texture of their surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted glass ; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen — against the light or with the light — always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby. In these two qualities, the accurately balanced form, and Fig. THE FLOWER 57 the perfectly infused colour of the petals, you have, as I said, the central being of the flower. All the other parts of it are necessary, but we must follow them out in order. 16. Looking down into the cup, you see the green boss di- vided by a black star, — of six rays only, — and surrounded by a few black spots. My rough-nurtured poppy contents itself with these for its centre ; a rich one would have had the green boss divided by a dozen of rays, and surrounded by a dark crowd of crested threads. This green boss is called by botanists the pistil, which word consists of the two first syllables of the Latin pistil- lum, otherwise more familiarly Englished into ' pestle.' The meaning of the botanical word is of course, also, that the cen- tral part of a flower-cup has to it something of the relations that a pestle has to a mortar ! Practically, however, as this pestle has no pounding functions, I think the word is mislead- ing as well as ungraceful ; and that we may find a better one after looking a little closer into the matter. For this pestle is divided generally into three very distinct parts : there is a storehouse at the bottom of it for the seeds of the plant ; above this, a shaft, often of considerable length in deep cups, rising to the level of their upper edge, or above it ; and at the top of these shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the botanists call 'style,' from the Greek word for a pillar ; and the crest of it — I do not know why — stigma, from the Greek word for 'spot.' The storehouse for the seeds they call the ' ovary,' from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you. have two- thirds of a Latin word, (pistil) — awkwardly , and disagreeably edged in between pestle and pistol — for the whole thing ; you have an English-Latin word (ovary) for the bottom of it ; an English-Greek word (style) for the middle ; and a pure Greek word (stigma) for the top. 17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse that the word style and stigma have both of them quite dif- ferent senses in ordinary and scholarly English from this forced botanical one. And I will venture therefore, for my own pupils, to put the four names altogether into English. Instead of calling the whole thing a pistil, I shall simply call PROSERPINA. it the pillar. Instead of 'ovary,' I shall say ' Treasury' (for a seed isn't an egg, but it is a treasure). The style I shall call the 'Shaft,' and the stigma the 'Volute.' So you will have your entire pillar divided into the treasury, at its base, the shaft, and the volute ; and I think you will find these divi- sions easily remembered, and not unfitted to the sense of the words in their ordinary use. 18. Bound this central, but, in the poppy, very stumpy, pillar, you find a cluster of dark threads, with dusty pen- dants or cups at their ends. For these the botanists name ' stamens,' may be conveniently retained, each consisting of a ' filament,' or thread, and an ' anther,' or blossoming part. And in this rich corolla, and pillar, or pillars, with their treasuries, and surrounding crowd of stamens, the essential flower consists. Fewer than these several parts, it cannot have, to be a flower at all ; of these, the corolla leads, and is the object of final purpose. The stamens and the treasuries are only there in order to produce future corollas, though often themselves decorative in the highest degree. These, I repeat, are all the essential parts of a flower. But it would have been difficult, with any other than the poppy, to have shown you them alone ; for nearly all other flowers keep with them, all their lives, their nurse or tutor leaves, — the group which, in stronger and humbler temper, pro- tected them in their first weakness, and formed them to the first laws of their being. But the poppy casts these tutorial leaves away. It is the finished picture of impatient and luxury-loving youth, — at first too severely restrained, then casting all restraint away, — yet retaining to the end of life unseemly and illiberal signs of its once compelled submission to laws which were only pain, — not instruction. 19. Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its side ; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there complete in size and colour, — its stamens full-grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture : the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground ; THE FLOWER 59 the aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can ; but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days. 20. Not so flowers of gracious breeding. Look at these four stages in the young life of a primrose, Fig. 7. First confined, as strictly as the poppy within five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it, the little thing is content to remain a child, and finds its nursery large enough. The green leaves unclose their points, — the little yellow ones peep out, like ducklings. They find the light delicious, and Fig. 7. open wide to it ; and grow, and grow, and throw themselves wider at last into their perfect rose. But they never leave their old nursery for all that ; it and they live on together ; and the nursery seems a part of the flower. 21. Which is so, indeed, in all the loveliest flowers ; and, in usual botanical parlance, a flower is said to consist of its calyx, (or hiding part — Calypso having rule over it,) and corolla, or garland part, Proserpina having rule over it. But it is better to think of them always as separate ; for this calyx, very justly so named from its main function of conceal- ing the flower, in its youth is usually green, not coloured, and 60 PROSERPINA. shows its separate nature by pausing, or at least greatly lin- gering, in its growth, and modifying itself very slightly, while the corolla is forming itself through active change. Look at the two, for instance, through the youth of a pease blossom, Fig. The entire cluster at first appears pen- I dent in this manner, fig. 8. the stalk bending round on purpose to put it into that position. On which all the little buds, thinking themselves ill- treated, determine not to submit to anything of the sort, turn their points upward persistently, and determine that — at any cost of trouble — they will get nearer the sun. Then they begin to open, and let out their corollas. I give the process of one only (Fig. 9).* It chances to be engraved the reverse way from the bud ; but that is of no consequence. At first, you see th e long lower point of the calyx thought that it w r as going to be the head of the family, and curls upwards eagerly. Then the little corolla steals out ; and soon does away with that impression on the mind of the calyx. The corolla soars up with widening wings, the abashed calyx re- treats beneath ; and finally the great upper leaf of corolla — not pleased at having its back still turned to the light, and its face down — throws itself entirely back, to look at the sky, and nothing else ; — and your blossom is complete. Keeping, therefore, the ideas of calyx and corolla entirely * Figs. 8 and 9 are both drawn and engraved by Mr. Burgess. Fig. 9. THE FLOWER 61 distinct, this one general point you may note of both ; that, as a calyx is originally folded tight over the flower, and has to open deeply to let it out, it is nearly always composed of sharp pointed leaves like the segments of a balloon ; while corollas having to open out as wide as possible to show themselves, are typically like cups or plates, only cut into their edges here and there, for ornamentation's sake. 22. And, finally, though the corolla is essentially the floral group of leaves, and usually receives the glory of colour for itself only, this glory and delight may be given to any other part of the group ; and, as if to show us that there is no really dishonoured or degraded membership, the stalks and leaves in some plants, near the blossom, flush in sympathy with it, and become themselves a part of the effectively visible flower ; — Eryngo — Jura hyacinth, (comosus,) and the edges of upper stems and leaves in many plants ; while others, (Geranium lu- cidum,) are made to delight us with their leaves rather than their blossoms ; only I suppose, in these, the scarlet leaf colour is a kind of early autumnal glow, — a beautiful hectic, and fore- taste, in sacred youth, of sacred death. I observe, among the speculations of modern science, sev- eral, lately, not uningenious, and highly industrious, on the subject of the relation of colour in flowers, to insects — to se- lective development, etc., etc. There are such relations, of course. So also, the blush of a girl, when she first perceives the faltering in her lover's step as he draws near, is related essentially to the existing state of her stomach ; and to the state of it through all the years of her previous existence 0 Nevertheless, neither love, chastity, nor blushing, are merely exponents of digestion. All these materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, are essen- tially the work of human bats ; men of semi-faculty or semi- education, who are more or less incapable of so much as see- ing, much less thinking about, colour ; among whom, for one- sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must be often ranked, as in his vespertilian treatise on the ocelli of the Argus pheasant, which he imagines to be artistically gradated, and perfectly imitative of a ball and docket. If I had him here in Oxford G2 PROSERPINA. for a week, and could force him to try to copy a feather by Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's thumbed marble, his notions of feathers, and balls, would be changed for all the rest of his life. But his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk of colour in the " Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, he thinks, are the re- sult of the admiration of blue tails in the minds of well-bred peahens, — and similarly, mandrills' noses the result of the admiration of blue noses in well-bred baboons. But it never occurs to him to ask w T hy the admiration of blue noses is healthy in baboons, so that it develops their race properly, while similar maidenly admiration either of blue noses or red noses in men would be improper, and develop the race im- properly. The word itself ' proper ' being one of which he has never asked, or guessed, the meaning. And when he imagined the gradation of the cloudings in feathers to represent succes- sive generation, it never occurred to him to look at the much finer cloudy gradations in the clouds of dawn themselves ; and explain the modes of sexual preference and selective develop- ment which had brought them to their scarlet glory, before the cock could crow thrice. Putting all these vespertilian speculations out of our way, the human facts concerning col- our are briefly these. Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour ; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them — in sky, soa, flowers, and living creatures. On the other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, they endure without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,) mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it is unhealthy for them to live, the poisonousness of the place is marked by some ghastly colour in air, earth or flowers. There are, of course, exceptions to all such widely founded laws ; there are poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies that are fair. But, if we once honestly compare a venomous wood-fungus, rotting into black dissolution of dripped slime at its edges, with a spring gentian ; or a puff adder with a Balmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at Berne, we shall get hold of the entire question on its right PAP AVER RHOEAS. 63 side ; and be able afterwards to study at our leisure, or accept without doubt or trouble, facts of apparently contrary mean- ing. And the practical lesson which I wish to leave with the reader is, that lovely flowers, and green trees growing in the open air, are the proper guides of men to the places which their maker intended them to inhabit ; while the flowerless and treeless deserts — of reed, or sand, or rock, — are meant to be either heroically invaded and redeemed, or surrendered to the wild creatures which are appointed for them ; happy and wonderful in their wild abodes. Nor is the world so small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered spaces of beautiful solitude ; where the chamois and red deer may wander fearless, — nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or Grampian, the rapture of the heath, and the rose. CHAPTER V. P A P A V E ft RHOEAS. Brantwood, July IWi, 1875. 1. Chancing to take up yesterday a favourite old book, Mavor's British Tourists, (London, 1798,) I found in its fourth volume a delightful diary of a journey made in 1782 through various parts of England, by Charles P. Moritz of Berlin. And in the fourteenth page of this diary I find the follow- ing passage, pleasantly complimentary to England : — " The slices of bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as thin as poppy leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually eaten with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good. This is called < toast.' " I wonder how many people, nowadays, whose bread and butter was cut too thin for them, would think of comparing the slices to poppy leaves? But this was in the old days oi travelling, when people did not whirl themselves past corn- fields, that they might have more time to walk on paving- 64 PROSERPINA. stones; and understood that poppies did not mingle their scarlet among the gold, without some purpose of the poppy- Maker that they should be looked at. Nevertheless, with respect to the good and polite German's poetically-contemplated, and finely aesthetic, tea, may it not be asked whether poppy leaves themselves, like the bread and butter, are not, if w r e may venture an opinion — too thin, — im- properly thin ? In the last chapter, my reader was, I hope, a little anxious to know w 7 hat I meant by saying that modern philosophers did not know the meaning of the word 6 proper/ and may wish to know what I mean by it myself. And this I think it needful to explain before going farther. 2. In our English prayer-book translation, the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm runs thus : " The Lord is King ; and hath put on glorious apparel." And although, in the future republican world, there are to be no lords, no kings, and no glorious apparel, it will be found convenient, for botanical purposes, to remember what such things once were ; for when I said of the poppy, in last chapter, that it was " robed in the purple of the Caesars," the words gave, to any one who had a clear idea of a Csesar, and of his dress, a better, and even stricter, account of the flower than if I had only said, with Mr. Sowerby, " petals bright scarlet ; " which might just as well have been said of a pimpernel, or scarlet geranium ; — but of neither of these latter should I have said " robed in purple of Caesars." What I meant was, first, that the poppy leaf looks dyed through and through, like glass, or Tyrian tissue ; and not merely painted : secondly, that the splendour of it is proud, — almost insolently so. Augustus, in his glory, might have been clothed like one of these ; and Saul ; but not David nor Solomon ; still less the teacher of Solomon, when He puts on ' glorious apparel.' 3. Let us look, however, at the two translations of the same verse. In the vulgate it is " Dominus regnavit ; decorem indutus est ; " He has put on 6 becomingness,' — decent apparel, rather than glorious. In the Septuagint it is zvirpzirua— we/Z-becomingnese ; an ex- PAPAVEll R110EAS. 65 pression which, if the reader considers, must imply certainly the existence of an opposite idea of possible ' a7Z-becoming- ness/ — of an apparel which should, in just as accurate a sense, belong appropriately to the creature invested with it, and yet not be glorious, but inglorious, and not well-becom- ing, but ill-becoming. The mandrill's blue nose, for instance, already referred to, can we rightly speak of this as ' evirpeire a ' ? Or the stings, and minute, colourless blossoming of the nettle ? May we call these a glorious apparel, as we may the glowing of an alpine rose ? You will find on reflection, and find more convincingly the more accurately you reflect, that there is an absolute sense attached to such words as ' decent,' ' honourable/ £ glorious,' or ' kuAos,' contrary to another absolute sense in the words ' indecent/ 'shameful/ 4 vile/ or ( alaxpos.* And that there is every degree of these absolute qualities visible in living creatures ; and that the divinity of the Mind of man is in its essential discernment of what is koXov from what is aicrxpov, and in his preference of the kind of creatures which are decent, to those which are indecent ; and of the kinds of thoughts, in himself, which are noble, to those which are vile. 4. When therefore I said that Mr. Darwin, and his school,* had no conception of the real meaning of the word ' proper,' I meant that they conceived the qualities of things only as their 'properties,' but not as their ' becomingnesses ; • and see- ing that dirt is proper to a swine, malice to a monke}% poison to a nettle, and folly to a fool, they called a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools but folly ; and never saw the difference between ugliness and beauty absolute, decency and indecency absolute, glory or shame absolute, and folly or sense absolute. Whereas, the perception of beauty, and the power of defin- ing physical character, are based on moral instinct, and on the power of defining animal or human character. Nor is it pos- sible to say that one flower is more highly developed, or one animal of a higher order, than another, without the assump- * Of Vespertilian science generally, compare 'Eagles' Nest/ pp. 23 and 126. 66 PROSERPINA. tion of a divine law of perfection to which the one more coi* forms than the other. 5. Thus, for instance. That it should ever have been an open question with me whether a pop- py had always two of its petals less than the other two, depended wholly on the hurry and imperfection with which the poppy carries out its plan. It never would have occurred to me to doubt whether an iris had three of its leaves smaller than the other three, be- cause an iris always completes itself to its own ideal. Nevertheless, on examining various poppies, as I walk- ed, this summer, up and down the hills between Sheffield and Wakefield, I find the subordina- tion of the upper and lower petals entirely necessary and normal ; and that the result of it is to give two distinct profiles to the poppy cup, the difference between which, however, we shall see better in the yellow Welsh poppy, at present called Meconopsis Cambrica; but which, in the Oxford school^ Fig. 10. FAPAVER RIIOEAS. 67 will be 'Papaver cruciforme ' — £ Crosslet Poppy/ — first, be- cause all our botanical names must be in Latin if possible ; Greek only allowed when we can do no better ; second ly, because meconopsis is barbarous Greek ; thirdly, and chiefly, because it is little matter whether this poppy be Welsh or English ; but very needful that we should observe, wher- ever it grows, that the petals are arranged in what used to be, in my young days, called a diamond shape,* as at A, Fig. 10, the two narrow inner ones at right angles to, and projecting farther than, the two outside broad ones ; and that the two broad ones, when the flower is seen in profile, as at B, show their margins folded back, as indicated by the thicker lines, and have a profile curve, which is only the softening, or melting away into each other, of two straight lines. Indeed, when the flower is younger, and quite strong, both its profiles, A and B, Fig. 11, are nearly straight-sided ; and always, be it young or old, one broader than the other, so as to give the flower, seen from above, the shape of a contracted cross, or crosslet. 6. Now I find no notice of this flower in Gerarde ; and in Sowerby, out of eighteen lines of closely printed descriptive text, no notice of its crosslet form, while the petals are only stated to be " roundish-concave," terms equally applicable to at least one-half of all flower petals in the world. The leaves * The mathematical term is ' rhomb. 1 68 PROSERPINA. are said to be very deeply pinnately partite ; but drawn — as neither pinnate nor partite ! And this is your modern cheap science, in ten volumes. Now I haven't a quiet moment to spare for drawing this morn- ing ; but I merely give the main relations of the petals, A, and blot in the wrinkles of one of the lower ones, B, Fig. 12 ; and yet in this rude sketch you will feel, I believe, there is some- thing specific which could not belong to any other iiow r er. But all proper description is impossible without careful pro- files of each petal laterally and across it. Which I may not find time to draw for any poppy whatever, because they none A B Fig. 12. of them have well-becomingness enough to make it worth my while, being all more or less weedy, and ungracious, and min- gled of good and evil. Whereupon rises before me, ghostly and untenable, the general question, ' What is a weed ? 5 and, impatient for answer, the particular question, What is a poppy ? I choose, for instance, to call this yellow flower a poppy, instead of a "likeness to poppy," which the botanists meant to call it, in their bad Greek. I choose also to call a poppy, what the botanists have called " glaucous thing," (glaucium). But where and when shall I stop calling things poppies ? This is certainly a question to be settled at once, with others apper- taining to it - ~ - - - PAP AVER RHOEAS. 69 7. In the first place, then, I mean to call every flower either one thing or another, and not an ' aceous ' thing, only half some- thing or half another. I mean to call this plant now in my hand, either a poppy or not a poppy ; but not poppaeeous. And this other, either a thistle or not a thistle ; but not thistla- ceous. And this other, either a nettle or not a nettle ; but not nettlaceous. I know it will be very difficult to carry out this principle when tribes of plants are much extended and varied in type : I shall persist in it, however, as far as possi- ble ; and when plants change so much that one cannot with any conscience call them by their family name any more, I shall put them aside somewhere among families of poor rela- tions, not to be minded for the present, until we are well ac- quainted with the better bred circles. I don't know, for in- stance, whether I shall call the Burnet ' Grass-rose,' or put it out of court for having no petals ; but it certainly shall not be called rosaceous ; and my first point will be to make sure of my pupils having a clear idea of the central and unques- tionable forms of thistle, grass, or rose, and assigning to them pure Latin, and pretty English, names, — classical, if possible? and at least intelligible and decorous. 8. I return to our present special question, then, What is a poppy ? and return also to a book I gave away long ago, and have just begged back again, Dr. Lindley's Ladies' Botany. For without at all looking upon ladies as inferior beings, I dimly hope that what Dr. Lindley considers likely to be intel- ligible to them, may be also clear to their very humble servant. The poppies, I find, (page 19, vol. i.) differ from crowfeet in being of a stupefying instead of a burning nature, and in generally having two sepals, and tw T ice two petals^ "but as some poppies have three sepals, and twice three petals, the num- ber of these parts is not sufficiently constant to form an essential mark." Yes, I know that, for I found a superb six- petaled poppy, spotted like a cistus, the other day in a friend's garden. But then, what makes it a poppy still ? That it is of a stupefying nature, and itself so stupid that it does not know how many petals it should have, is surely not enough distinction ? 70 PROSERPINA. 9. Eeturning to Lindley, and working the matter farther out with his help, I think this definition might stand : " A poppy is a flower which has either four or six petals, and two or more treasuries, united into one ; containing a milky, stupe- fying fluid in its stalks and leaves, and always throwing away its calyx when it blossoms." And indeed, every flower which unites all these characters, we shall, in the Oxford schools, call 'poppy/ and 'Papaver ;' but when I get fairly into work, I hope to fix my definitions into more strict terms. For I wish all my pupils to form the habit of asking, of every plant, these following four questions, in order, corresponding to the subject of these opening chap- ters, namely, "What root has it? what leaf? what flower? and what stem ? " And, in this definition of poppies, nothing w r hatever is said about the root ; and not only I don't know myself what a poppy root is like, but in all Sowerby's poppy section, I find no word whatever about that matter. 10. Leaving, however, for the present, the root unthought of, and contenting myself with Dr. Lindley 's characteristics, I shall place, at the head of the whole group, our common European wild poppy, Papaver Ehoeas, and, with this, arrange the nine following other flowers thus, — opposite. I must be content at present with determining the Latin names for the Oxford schools ; the English ones I shall give as they chance to occur to me, in Gerard e and the classical poets who wrote before the English revolution. When no satisfactory name is to be found, I must try to invent one ; as, for instance, just now, I don't like Gerard's ■ Corn-rose ' for Papaver Ehoeas, and must coin another ; but this can't be done by thinking : it will come into my head some day, by chance. I might try at it straightforwardly for a week to- gether, and not do it. The Latin names must be fixed at once, somehow ; and therefore I do the best I can, keeping as much respect for the old nomenclature as possible, though this involves the illogical practice of giving the epithet sometimes from the flower, (violaceum, cruciforme), and sometimes from the seed vessel, (elatum, echinosum, corniculatum). Guarding this distinc- PAP AVER EI10EAS. 71 tion, however, we may perhaps be content to call the six last of the group, in English, Urchin Poppy, Violet Poppy, Cross- let Poppy, Horned Poppy, Beach Poppy, and Welcome Poppy. I don't think the last flower pretty enough to be connected more directly with the swallow, in its English name. Name in Oxford Catalogue. DlOSCOKIDES. In present Botany. 3. P. Elatum fl7)KU>V potas.. . . fl. KTjTreVTTJ * . . fJL. dvKaKLTIS f . . Papaver EJioeas P. Hortense P. Lamottei P. Argemone P. Hybrid urn Roemeria Hybrida Meconopsis Cambrica Glaucium Corniculatum Glaucium Luteum Cheiidonium Majus 5. P. Eehinosnm 6. P. Violaomim 9. P. Littorale 10. P. Chelidonium fx. Kepariris . . . /j.. irapaKios.. . . 11. I shall be well content if my pupils know these ten pop- pies rightly ; all of them at present wild in our own country, and, I believe, also European in range : the head and type of all being the common wild poppy of our cornfields for which the name 'Papaver Khoeas, ' given it by Dioscorides, Gerard e, and Linnaeus, is entirely authoritative, and we will therefore at once examine the meaning, and reason, of that name, 12. Dioscorides says the name belongs to it " Sta to ra^eW to av8os airofiaWeLv" " because it casts off its bloom quickly," from pew, (rheo) in the sense of shedding.J And this indeed it does, — first calyx, then corolla ; — you may translate it 6 swiftly ruinous ' poppy, but notice, in connection with this idea, how it droops its head before blooming : an action which I doubt not, mingled in Homer's thought with the image of its depression when filled by rain, in the passage of the Iliad, * §s rb (Tirepfxa aproTroi^Tai. | iiriurjKes ix ovffa ™ Ki THE PARABLE OF J0A8R. 79 another and higher order than the corn, and you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbrier or apple-blossom. They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place. What is it, then, this temper in some plants — malicious as it seems — intrusive, at all events, or erring, — which brings them out of their places — thrusts them where they thwart us and offend? 7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and tender ones keep at home. You have no trouble in ' keeping down * the spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as like heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it to give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors, above the high force of Tees ; its Latin name, for us (I may as well tell you at once) is to be 'Lucia verna and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale. 8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able to live anywhere, and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as I know, is the first of large-leaved plants to grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed : fall of Alpine debris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by flood, it seeks to heal and redeem ; but it does not offend us in our gardens, nor impoverish us in our fields. Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate hardihood, is at least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. That it should have no choice of home, no love of native land, is ungentle ; much more if such discrimination as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open and much-tra- versed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers. The tormentilla gleams in showers along the mountain turf ; her delicate crosslets are separate, though constellate, as the rubied daisy. But the king-cup — (blessing be upon it always no less) — crowds itself sometimes into too burnished flame of inevitable gold. I don't know if there w T as anything in the darkness of this last spring to make it brighter in resist- ance ; but I never saw any spaces of full warm yellow, in natural colour, so intense as the meadows between Beading 80 PROSERPINA. and the Thames ; nor did I know perfectly what purple and gold meant, till I saw a field of park land embroidered a foot deep with king-cup and clover — while I was correcting my last notes on the spring colours of the Royal Academy — at Ayles- bury. 9. And there are two other questions of extreme subtlety connected with this main one. What shall we say of the plants whose entire destiny is parasitic — which are not only sometimes, and impertinently, but always, and pertinently, out of place ; not only out of the right place, but out of any place of their own ? When is mistletoe, for instance, in the right place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling ? Wlien is ivy in the right place ? — when wall- flower ? The ivy has been torn down from the towers of Ken- ilworth ; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and from the steps of the Araceli, irreverently, vilely, and in vain ; but how are we to separate the creatures whose office it is to abate the grief of ruin by their gentleness, " wafting wallflower scents From ont the crumbling ruins of fallen pride, And chambers of transgression, now forlorn," from those which truly resists the toil of men, and conspire against their fame ; which are cunning to consume, and pro- lific to encumber ; and of whose perverse and unwelcome sowing we know, and can say assuredly, " An enemy hath done this." • 10. Again. The character of strength which gives preva- lence over others to any common plant, is more or less con- sistently dependent on woody fibre in the leaves : giving them strong ribs and great expanding extent ; or spinous edges, and wrinkled or gathered extent. Get clearly into your mind the nature of these two con- ditions. When a leaf is to be spread wide, like the Burdock, it is supported by a framework of extending ribs like a Gothic roof. The supporting function of these is geometrical ; every one is constructed like the girders of a bridge, or beams of a floor, with all manner of science in the distribution of their THE PARABLE OF JOASH. 81 substance in the section, for narrow and deep strength ; and the shafts are mostly hollow. But when the extending space of a leaf is to be enriched with fulness of folds, aud become beautiful in wrinkles, this may be done either by pure undu- lation as of a liquid current along the leaf edge, or by sharp ' drawing ' — or ' gathering ' I believe ladies would call it — and stitching of the edges together. And this stitching together, if to be done very strongly, is done round a bit of stick, as a sail is reefed round a mast ; and this bit of stick needs to be compactly, not geometrically strong ; its function is essentially that of starch, — not to hold the leaf up off the ground against gravity ; but to stick the edges out, stiffly, in a crimped frill. And in beautiful work of this kind, which we are meant to study, the stays of the leaf — or stay-bones — are finished off very sharply and exquisitely at the points ; and indeed so much so, that they "prick our fingers when we touch them ; for they are not at ail meant to be touched, but admired. 11. To be admired, — with qualification, indeed, always, but with extreme respect for their endurance and orderliness. Among flowers that pass away, and leaves that shake as with ague, or shrink like bad cloth, — these, in their sturdy growth and enduring life, we are bound to honour ; and, under the green holly, remember how much softer friendship was failing, and how much of other loving, folly. And yet — you are not to confuse the thistle with the cedar that is in Lebanon ; nor to forget — if the spinous nature of it become too cruel to provoke and offend — the parable of Joash to Amaziah, and its fulfilment : " There passed by a wild beast that was in Leba- non, and trode down the thistle." 12. Then, lastly, if this rudeness and insensitiveness of nature be gifted with no redeeming beauty ; if the boss of the thistle lose its purple, and the star of the Lion's tooth, its light ; and, much more, if service be perverted as beauty is lost, and the honied tube, and medicinal leaf, change into mere swollen emptiness, and salt brown membrane, swayed in nerveless languor by the idle sea, — at last the separation between the two natures is as great as between the fruitful earth and fruitless ocean ; and between the living hands that 82 PROSERPINA. tend the Garden of Herbs where Love is, and those unclasped, that toss with tangle and with shells. % * * Hi % 13. I had a long bit in my head, that I wanted to write, about St. George of the Seaweed, but I've no time to do it ; and those few words of Tennyson's are enough, if one thinks of them : only I see, in correcting press, that I've partly mis- applied the idea of ' gathering ' in the leaf edge. It would be more accurate to say it was gathered at the central rib ; but there is nothing in needlework that will represent the actual excess by lateral growth at the edge, giving three or four inches of edge for one of centre. But the. stiffening of the fold by the thorn which holds it out is very like the action of a ship's spars on its sails ; and absolutely in many cases like that of the spines in a fish's fin, passing into the various con- ditions of serpentine and dracontic crest, connected with all the terrors and adversities of nature ; not to be dealt with in a chapter on weeds. 14. Here is a sketch of a crested leaf of less adverse temper, which may as well be given, together with Plate HL, in this number, these two engravings being meant for examples of two different methods of drawing, both useful according to character of subject. Plate HI. is sketched first with a finely- pointed pen, and common ink, on white paper ; then washed rapidly with colour, and retouched with the pen to give sharp- ness and completion. This method is used because the thistle leaves are full of complex and sharp sinuosities, and set with intensely sharp spines passing into hairs, which require many kinds of execution with the fine point to imitate at all. In the drawing there was more look of the bloom or woolliness ov the stems, but it was useless to try for this in the mezzotint, and I desired Mr. Allen to leave his work at the stage where it expressed as much form as I wanted. The leaves are of the common marsh thistle, of which more anon ; and the two long lateral ones are only two different views of the same leaf, while the central figure is a young leaf just opening. It beat me, in its delicate bossing, and I had to leave it, discontent edly enough. Plate III. — Acanthoid Leaves. Northern Attic Type, THE PARABLE OF JOASH. 83 Plate IV. is much better work, being of an easier subject, adequately enough rendered by perfectly simple means. Here I had only a succulent and membranous surface to rep- resent, with definite outlines, and merely undulating folds ; and this is sufficiently done by a careful and firm pen outline on grey paper, with a slight wash of colour afterwards, rein- forced in the darks; then marking the lights with white. This method is classic and authoritative, being used by many of the greatest masters, (by Holbein continually ;) and it is much the best which the general student can adopt for ex- pression of the action and muscular power of plants. The goodness or badness of such work depends absolutely on the truth of the single line. You will find a thousand bo- tanical drawings which will give you a delicate and deceptive resemblance of the leaf, for one that will give you the right convexity in its backbone, the right perspective of its peaks when they foreshorten, or the right relation of depth in the shading of its dimples. On which, in leaves as in faces, no little expression of temper depends. Meantime we have yet to consider somewhat more touch- ing that temper itself, in next chapter. CHAPTER VH. THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM. 1. I do not know if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which, doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford sys- tem as in any parental relations whatsoever. We shall, however, find some very notable relations existing between the two groups of the wild flowers of dry land, which represent, in the widest extent, and the distinctest opposition, the two characters of material serviceableness and unservice- 84 PROSERPINA. ableness ; the groups which in our English classification will be easily remembered as those of the Thyme, and the Daisy. The one, scented, as with incense — medicinal — and in all gentle and humble ways, useful. The other, scentless — help- less for ministry to the body ; infinitely dear as the bringer of light, ruby, white and gold ; the three colours of the Day, with no hue of shade in it. Therefore I take it on the coins of St. George for the symbol of the splendour or light of heaven, which is dearest where humblest. 2. Now these great two orders — of which the types are the thyme and the daisy — you are to remember generally as the "Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.' You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers ; because the first is a vulgar term ; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip, or, in noble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth is like that : and the second is an indefinite term ; for a foxglove is as much a ' composed ' flower as a daisy ; but it is composed in the shape of a spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is com- posed in quite another shape, being on the whole, bossy in- stead of flat ; and of another temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and gen- erally unluminous — flowers I can scarcely call them — and weeds I will not, — creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general name ' Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she returns to the day from the dead. But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye— again you see I refuse for them the word weed ; — and the waste-loving Chicory, which the Venetians call " Sponsa solis,' j are all to be held in one class with the Sunflowers ; but dedi* cate, — the daisy to Alcestis alone ; others to Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself ; but I can't follow their mythology yet awhile. S. Now in these two families you have typically Use op THE PARABLE OF JOT II AM. 85 posed to Beauty in wildness ; it is their wildness which is theii virtue ; — that the thyme is sweet where it is unth ought of, and the daisies red, where the foot despises them : while, in other orders, wildness is their crime, — " Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes ? " But in all of them you must distinguish between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our duty to tame them ; but it must be, to relieve. 4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood, left uncared-for evi- dently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut my way into it through a mass of thorny ruin ; black, birds-nest like, entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill- grown birches strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts ; knotted stumps of never-blos- soming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into merely unctuous clods and clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It was all Nature's free doing ! she had had her way with it to the uttermost ; and clearly needed human help and interference in her busi- ness ; and yet there was not one plant in the whole ruinous and deathful riot of the place, whose nature was not in itself wholesome and lovely ; but all lost for want of discipline. 5. The other piece of wild growth was among the fallen blocks of limestone under Malham Cove. Sheltered by the cliff above from stress of wind, the ash and hazel wood spring there in a fair and perfect freedom, without a diseased bough, or an unwholesome shade. I do not know why mine is all encumbered with overgrowth, and this so lovely that scarce a branch could be gathered but with injury ; — while under- neath, the oxalis, and the two smallest geraniums (Lucidum and Herb-Robert) and the mossy saxifrage, and the cross- leaved bed-straw, and the white pansy, wrought themselves 86 PROSERPINA. into wreaths among the fallen crags, in which every leaf re- joiced, and was at rest. 6. Now between these two states of equally natural growth, the point of difference that forced itself on me (and practically enough, in the work I had in my own wood), was not so much the withering and waste of the one, and the life of the other, as the thorniness and cruelty of the one, and the softness of the other. In Malham Cove, the stones of the brook were softer with moss than any silken pillow — the crowded oxalis leaves yielded to the pressure of the hand, and were not felt — the cloven leaves of the Herb-Robert and orbed clusters of its companion overflowed every rent in the rude crags with living balm ; there was scarcely a place left by the ten- derness of the happy things, where one might not lay down one's forehead on their warm softness, and sleep. But in the w T aste and distressed ground, the distress had changed itself to cruelty. The leaves had all perished, and the bending saplings, and the wood of trust ; — but the thorns were there, immortal, and the gnarled and sapless roots, and the dusty treacheries of decay. 7. Of which things you will find it good to consider also otherwise than botanically. For all these lower organisms suffer and perish, or are gladdened and flourish, under condi- tions which are in utter precision symbolical, and in utter fidelity representative, of the conditions which induce adver- sity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men : and the Eternal Demeter, — Mother, and Judge, — brings forth, as the herb yielding seed, so also the thorn and the thistle, not to herself, but to thee. 8. You have read the words of the great Law often enough ; ■ — have you ever thought enough of them to know the differ- ence between these tw r o appointed means of Distress? The first, the Thorn, is the type of distress canned by crime, chang- ing the soft and breathing leaf into inflexible and wounding st ubbornness. The second is the distress appointed to be the means and herald of good, — Thou shaltsee the stubborn this- tle bursting, into glossy purple, which outredden, all voluptu- ous garden roses. THE PARABLE OF JO TEAM. 87 9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find au- thentic note of the day when Scotland took the thistle for her emblem ; and I have no space (in this chapter at least) for tradition ; but, with whatever lightness of construing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest that could have been found, for some conditions of the Scottish mind. There is no flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly : and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves ; yet the stubbornness and ungrace- ful rectitude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and dominance, — I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on : — let them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,* take their Scott from the inner shelf in their heart's library which all true Scotsmen give him, and trace, with the swift reading of memory, the characters of Fergus M'lvor, Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice ; and then say, if the faults of all these, drawn as they are with a precision of touch like a Corinthian sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be found in anything like the same strength in other races, or if so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies of irritating kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and intolerable fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the habitable globe. 10. Will you note also — for this is of extreme interest — that these essential faults are all mean faults ; — what we may call ground-growing faults ; conditions of semi-education, * Has my reader ever thought, — I never did till this moment, — now it perfects the exquisite character which Scott himself loved, as he in- vented, till he changed the form of the novel, that his habitual inter- jection should be this word ; — not but that the oath, by conscience, was happily still remaining then in Scotland, taking the place of the me* diaeval ' by St. Andrew,' we in England, long before the Scot, having lost all sense of the Puritanical appeal to private conscience, as of the Catholic oath, * by St. George ; ' and our uncanonized ' by George ' in sonorous rudeness, ratifying, not now our common conscience, but our individual opinion. 88 PROSERPINA. of hardly-treated homelife, or of coarsely-minded and wander- ing prosperity. How literally may we go back from the liv- ing soul symbolized, to the strangely accurate earthly symbol, in the prickly weed. For if, with its bravery of endurance, and carelessness in choice of home, we find also definite faculty and habit of migration, volant mechanism for choice- less journey, not divinely directed in pilgrimage to known shrines ; but carried at the wind's will by a Spirit which listeth not — it will go hard but that the plant shall become, if not dreaded, at least despised ; and, in its wandering and reckless splendour, disgrace the garden of the sluggard, and possess the inheritance of the prodigal : until even its own nature seems contrary to good, and the invocation of the just man be made to it as the executor of Judgment, " Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley." 11. Yet to be despised — either for men or flowers — may be no ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. ; These faults of human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as ill-trained — incomplete ; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no base pertinacity, no over- weening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or Claverhouse, or Montrose ; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of heroic endurance and royal pride ; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived, but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scot- tish persistence and pride become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the sense- less legends of the eternal gravestone, — you get your weed, earth grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength. 12. I have told you, elsewhere, we are always first to study national character in the highest and purest examples. But if our knowledge is to be complete, we have to study also the special diseases of national character. And in exact opposi- tion to the most solemn virtue of Scotland, the domestic truth and tenderness breathed in all Scottish song, you have this special disease and mortal cancer, this woody-fibriness, literally, of temper and thought : the consummation of which into pure THE PARABLE OF JO TEAM. 89 lignite, or rather black Devil's charcoal — the sap of the birks of Aberfeldy become cinder, and the blessed juices of them, deadly gas, — you may know in its pure blackness best in the work of the greatest of these ground-growing Scotchmen, Adam Smith. 13. No man of like capacity, I believe, born of any other nation, could have deliberately, and with no momentary shadow of suspicion or question, formalized the spinous and monstrous fallacy that human commerce and policy are natur- ally founded on the desire of every man to possess his neigh- bour's goods. This is the 'release unto us Barabbas,' with a witness ; and the deliberate systematization of that cry, and choice, for perpetual repetition and fulfilment in Christian statesmanship, has been, with the strange precision of natural symbolism and retribution, signed, (as of old, by strewing of ashes on Kidron,) by strewing of ashes on the brooks of Scotland ; waters once of life, health, music, and divine tradition ; but to whose festering scum you may now set fire with a candle ; and of which, round the once excelling palace of Scotland, modern sanitary science is now helplessly contending with the poisonous exhalations. 14. I gave this chapter its heading, because I had it in my mind to work out the meaning of the fable in the ninth chap- ter of Judges, from what I had seen on that thorny ground of mine, where the bramble was king over all the trees of the wood. But the thoughts are gone from me now ; and as I re-read the chapter of Judges, — now, except in my memory, unread, as it chances, for many a year, — the sadness of that story of Gideon fastens on me, and silences me. This the end of his angel visions, and dream-led victories, the slaughter of all his sons but this youngest,* — and he never again heard of in Israel ! You Scottish children of the Kock, taught through all your once pastoral and noble lives by many a sweet miracle of dew on fleece and ground, — once servants of mighty kings, and * ' Jotliam,' * Sum perfectio eorum,' or ' Consummatio ecrum.' (In- terpretation of name in V ulgate index ) 90 PROSERPINA. keepers of sacred covenant ; have you indeed dealt truly with your warrior kings, and prophet saints, or are these ruins of their homes, and shrines, dark with the fire that fell from the curse of Jerubbaal? CHAPTER Vm. THE STEM. 1. As I read over again, with a fresh mind, the last chapter, I am struck by the opposition of states which seem best to fit a weed for a weed's work, — stubbornness, namely, and flaccid- ity. On the one hand, a sternness and a coarseness of struct- ure which changes its stem into a stake, and its leaf into a spine ; on the other, an utter flaccidity and ventosity of structure, which changes its stem into a riband, and its leaf into a bubble. And before we go farther — for we are not yet at the end of our study of these obnoxious things — we had better complete an examination of the parts of a plant in general, by ascertain- ing what a Stem proper is ; and what makes it stiffer, or hollo w- er, than we like it ; — how, to wit, the gracious and generous strength of ash differs from the spinous obstinacy of black- thorn, — and how the geometric and enduring hollowness of a stalk of wheat differs from the soft fulness of that of a mush- room. To which end, I will take up a piece of study, not of black, but white, thorn, written last spring. 2. I suppose there is no question but that all nice people like hawthorn blossom. I want, if I can, to find out to-day, 25th May, 1875, what it is we like it so much for : holding these two branches of it in my hand — one full out, the other in youth. This full one is a mere mass of symmetrically balanced — snow, one was going vaguely to write, in the first impulse. But it is nothing of the sort. White, — yes, in a high degree ; and pure, totally ; but not at all dazzling in the white, nor pure in an insultingly rivalless manner, as snow would be ; yet pure somehow, cer- tainly ; and white, absolutely, in spite of what might be thought failure, : — imperfection — nay, even distress and loss in it. For THE STEM. 91 every little rose of it lias a green darkness in the centre — not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish, glutinous, un- accomplished green ; and round that, all over the surface of the blossom, whose shell-like petals are themselves deep sunk, with grey shadows in the hollows of them — all above this al- ready subdued brightness, are strewn the dark points of the dead stamens — manifest more and more, the longer one looks, as a kind of grey sand, sprinkled without sparing over what looked at first unspotted light. And in all the ways of it the lovely thing is more like the spring frock of some prudent lit- tle maid of fourteen, than a flower ;— ^froek with some little spotty pattern on it to keep it from showing an unintended and inadvertent spot, — if Fate should ever inflict such a thing ! Undeveloped, thinks Mr. Darwin, — the poor short-coming, ill-blanched thorn blossom — going to be a Eose, some day soon ; and, what next? — who knows ? — perhaps a Paeony ! 3. Then this next branch, in dawn and delight of youth, set with opening clusters of yet numerable blossom, four, and five, and seven, edged, and islanded, and ended, by the sharp leaves of freshest green, deepened under the flowers, and stud- ded round with bosses, better than pearl beads of St. Agnes' rosary, — folded over and over, with the edges of their little leaves pouting, as the very softest waves do on flat sand where one meets another ; then opening just enough to show the violet colour within — which yet isn't violet colour, nor even " meno che le rose," but a different colour from every other lilac that one ever saw ; — faint and faded even before it sees light, as the filmy cup opens over the depth of it, then broken into purple motes of tired bloom, fading into darkness, as the cup extends into the perfect rose. This, with all its sweet change that one would so fain stay, and soft effulgence of bud into softly falling flower, one has watched — how often ; but always with the feeling that the blossoms are thrown over the green depth like white clouds — never with any idea of so much as asking what holds the clouds there. Have each of the innumerable blossoms a separate stalk ? and, if so, how is it that one never thinks of the stalk, as one does with currants? 92 PROSERPINA. 4. Turn the side of the branch to you ; — Nature never meant you to see it so ; but now it is all stalk below, and stamens above, — the petals nothing, the stalks all tiny trees, always dividing their branches mainly into three — one in the centre short, and the two lateral, long, with an intermediate extremely long one, if needed, to fill a gap, so contriving that the flow- ers shall all be nearly at the same level, or at least surface of ball, like a guelder rose. But the cunning with which the tree conceals its structure till the blossom is fallen, and then ■ — for a little while, we had best look no more at it, for it is all like grape-stalks with no grapes. These, whether carrying hawthorn blossom and haw, or grape blossom and grape, or peach blossom and peach, you will simply call the c stalk,' whether of flower or fruit. A ' stalk ; is essentially round, like a pillar ; and has, for the most part, the power of first developing, and then shaking off, flower and fruit from its extremities. You can pull the peach from its stalk, the cherry, the grape. Always at some time of its existence, the flower-stalk lets fall something of what it sus- tained, petal or seed. In late Latin it is called 'petiolus,' the little foot ; because the expanding piece that holds the grape, or olive, is a little like an animals foot. Modern botanists have misapplied the word to the leaf-stalk, which has no resemblance to a foot at all. We must keep the word to its proper meaning, and, when we want to write Latin, call it ' petiolus ; ' when we want to write English, call it ' stalk,' meaning always fruit or flower stalk. I cannot find when the word ' stalk ' first appears in Eng- lish :— its derivation will be given presently. 5. Gather next a hawthorn leaf. That also has a stalk ; but you can't shake the leaf off it. It, and the leaf, are essentially one ; for the sustaining fibre runs up into every ripple or jag of the leaf's edge : and its section is different from that of the flower-stalk ; it is no more round, but has an upper and under surface, quite different from each other. It will be better, however, to take a larger leaf to examine this structure in. Cabbage, cauliflower, or rhubarb, would any of them be good, THE STEM. 93 but don't grow wild in the luxuriance I want. So, if you please, we will take a leaf of burdock, (Arctium Lappa,) the principal business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn fore-grounds.* 6. The outline of it in Sowerby is not an intelligent one, and I have not time to draw it but in the rudest way myself ; Fig. 13, a ; with perspectives of the elementary form below, b, c, and d. By help of which, if you will con- struct a burdock leaf in paper, my rude outline (a) may tell the rest of what I want you to see. Take a sheet of stout note paper, Fig. 14, A, double it sharply down the centre, by the dotted line, then give it the two cuts at a and b, and double those pieces sharply back, as at B ; then, opening them again, cut the whole into the form C ; and then, pulling up the corners c d, stitch them together with a loose thread so that the points c and d shall be within half an inch of each other ; and you will have a kind of triangular scoop, or shovel, with a stem, by which you can sufficiently hold it, D. 7. And from this easily constructed and tenable model, you may learn at once these following main facts about all leaves. * If you will look at the engraving, in the England and Wales series, of Turner's Oakhampton, you will see its use. Fig. 13. 94 PROSERPINA. [I] That they are not flat, but, however slightly, always hollowed into craters, or raised into hills, in one or another direction ; so that any drawable outline of them does not in the least represent the real extent of their surfaces ; and until you know how to draw a cup, or a mountain, rightly, you have no chance of drawing a leaf. My simple artist readers of long ago, when I told them to draw leaves, thought they could do them by the boughf ul, whenever they liked. Alas, except by old WilliamHunt, and Burne Jones, I've not seen a leaf painted, since those burdocks of Turner's ; far less sculptured — though a 7> D Fig. 14. one would think at first that was easier ! Of which we shall have talk elsewhere ; here I must go on to note fact number two, concerning leaves. 8. [IX] The strength of their supporting stem consists not merely in the gathering together of all the fibres, but in gathering them essentially into the profile of the letter V, which you will see your doubled paper stem has ; and of which you can feel the strength and use, in your hand, as you hold it. Gather a common plantain leaf, and look at the way it puts its round ribs together at the base, and you will under- stand the matter at once. The arrangement is modified and THE STEM. 95 disguised in every possible way, according to the leaf's need : in the aspen, the leaf-stalk becomes an absolute vertical plank ; and in the large trees is often almost rounded into the like- ness of a fruit- stalk ; — but, in all,* the essential structure is this doubled one ; and in all, it opens at the place where the leaf joins the main stem, into a kind of cup, which holds next year's bud in the hollow of it. 9. Now there would be no inconvenience in your simply getting into the habit of calling the round petiol of the fruit the 'stalk,' and the contracted channel of the leaf, J leaf-stalk/ But this way of naming them would not enforce, nor fasten in your mind, the difference between the two, so well as if you have an entirely different name for the leaf-stalk. Which is the more desirable, because the limiting character of the leaf, botanically, is — (I only learned this from my botanical friend the other day, just in the very moment I wanted it,) — that it holds the bud of the new stem in its own hollow, but cannot itself grow in the hollow of anything else ; — or, in botanical language, leaves are never axillary, — don't grow in armpits, but are themselves armpits ; hollows, that is to say, where they spring from the main stem. 10. Now there is already a received and useful botanical word, 'cyme' (which we shall want in a little while,) derived from the Greek Kiyxa, a swelling or rising wave, and used to express a swelling cluster of foamy blossom. Connected with that word, but in a sort the reverse of it, you have the Greek ' kv/x/3t7,' the hollow of a cup, or bowl ; whence Kv^paXpy, a cymbal, — that is to say, a musical instrument owing its tone to its holloivness. These words become in Latin, cymba, and cymbalum ; and I think you will find it entirely convenient and advantageous to call the leaf-stalk distinctively the 'cymba/ retaining the mingled idea of cup and boat, with respect at least to the part of it that holds the bud ; and understanding that it gathers itself into a V-shaped, or even narrowly verti- cal, section, as a boat narrows to its bow, for strength to sustain the leaf. * General assertions of this kind must always be accepted under in- dulgence,— exceptions being made afterwards. 96 PROSERPINA. With this word you may learn the Virgilian line, that shows the final use of iron — or iron-darkened — ships : " Et ferruginea sabvectat corpora cyinba." The " subvectat corpora w will serve to remind you. of the office of the leafy cymba in carrying the bud ; and make you thankful that the said leafy vase is not of iron ; and is a ship of Life instead of Death. 11. Already, not once, nor twice, I have had to use the word ' stem,' of the main round branch from which both stalk and cymba spring. This word you had better keep for all grow- ing, or advancing, shoots of trees, whether from the ground, or from central trunks and branches. I regret that the words multiply on us ; but each that I permit myself to use has its own proper thought or idea to express, as you will presently perceive ; so that true knowledge multiplies with true words. 12. The ' stem,' you are to say, then, when you mean the ad- vancing shoot, — which lengthens annually, while a stalk ends every year in a blossom, and a cymba in a leaf. A stem is es- sentially round,* square, or regularly polygonal ; though, as a cymba may become exceptionally round, a stem may become exceptionally flat, or even mimic the shape of a leaf. Indeed I should have liked to write " a stem is essentially round, and constructively, on occasion, square," — but it would have been too grand. The fact is, however, that a stem is really a roundly minded thing, throwing off its branches in circles as a trundled mop throws off drops, though it can always order the branches to fly off in what order it likes, — two at a time, opposite to each other ; or three, or five, in a spiral coil ; or one here and one there, on this side and that ; but it is always twisting, in its own inner mind and force ; hence it is espe- cially proper to use the word ' stem 9 of it — o-re/x/xa, a twined wreath ; properly, twined round a staff, or sceptre : therefore, learn at once by heart these lines in the opening Iliad : Xpvffeq) ava CK^Trrpcp' " And recollect that a sceptre is properly a staff to lean upon*; and that as a crown or diadem is first a binding thing, a * I use ' round' rather than * cylindrical,' for simplicity's sake. Plate V.— Occult Spiral Action. Waste-Thistle. THE STEM. 9? A sceptre 9 is first a supporting thing, and it is in its nobleness,, itself made of the stem of a young tree. You may just as well learn also this : " Nal jua Tc&e (rxYjirrpov, rb p.\v ovirore root the daisies of the Rhine, lest French girls should also * See Miss Yonge's exhaustive account of the Name, 'History oi Christian Names,' vol. i , p. 265. f (Du Cange.) The word ' Margarete ' is given as heraldic English for pearl, by Lady Juliana Berners, in the book of St. Albans. THE STEM. 103 count their love-lots by the Marguerite. I must be so ungra- cious to my fair young readers, however, as to warn them that this trial of their lovers is a very favourable one, for, in nine blossoms out of ten, the leaves of the Marguerite are odd, so that, if they are only gracious enough to begin with the supposition that he loves them, they must needs end in the conviction of it. 23. I am concerned, however, for the present, only with my first or golden order, of which the Koof-foil, or house-leek, is called in present botany, Sedum, ' the squatter/ because of its way of fastening itself down on stones, or roof, as close as it can sit. But I think this.an ungraceful notion of its behaviour ; and as its blossoms are, of all flowers, the most sharply and distinctly star-shaped, I shall call it ' Stella ' (providing other- wise, in due time, for the poor little duckweeds ;) and the common stonecrop will therefore be ' Stella domestical The second tribe, (at present saxifraga,) growing for the most part wild on rocks, may, I trust, even in Protestant bot- any, be named Francesca, after St. Francis of Assisi ; not only for its modesty, and love of mountain ground, and poverty of colour and leaf ; but also because the chief element of its dec- oration, seen close, will be found in its spots, or stigmata. In the nomenclature of the third order I make no change. 24. Now all this group of golden-blossoming plants agree in general character of having a rich cluster of radical leaves, from which they throw up a single stalk bearing clustered blossoms ; for which stalk, when entirely leafless, I intend al- ways to keep the term ' virgula,' the c little rod ' — not painfully caring about it, but being able thus to define it with precision, if required. And these are connected with the stems of branch- ing shrubs through infinite varieties of structure, in which the first steps of transition are made by carrying the cluster of radical leaves up, and letting them expire gradually from the rising stem : the changes of form in the leaves as they rise higher from the ground being one of quite the most interest- ing specific studies in every plant. I had set myself once, in a bye-study for foreground drawing, hard on this point ; and began, with Mr. Burgess, a complete analysis of the foliation 104 PROSERPINA. of annual stems ; of which Line-studies II, m, and IV. are ex- amples ; reduced copies, all, from the beautiful Flora Danica. But after giving two whole lovely long summer days, under the Giesbach, to the blue scabious, (' Devil's bit,') and getting in that time, only half-way up it, I gave in ; and must leave the work to happier and younger souls. 25. For these flowering stems, therefore, possessing nearly all the complex organization of a tree, but not its permanence, we will keep the word ' virga ; ' and £ virguia ' for those that have no leaves. I believe, when we come to the study of leaf- order, it will be best to begin with these annual virgse, in which the leaf has nothing to do with preparation for a next year's branch. And now the remaining terms commonly ap- plied to stems may be for the most part dispensed with ; but several are interesting, and must be examined before dis- missal. 26. Indeed, in the first place, the word we have to use so often, £ stalk,' has not been got to the roots of, yet. It comes from the Greek crrcAe^os, (stelechos,) the ' holding part' of a tree, that which is like a handle to all its branches ; ' stock ' is another form in which it has come down to us : with some notion of its being the mother of branches : thus, when Athe- na's olive was burnt by the Persians, two days after, a shoot a cubit long had sprung from the 6 stelechos,' of it. 27. Secondly. Few words are more interesting to the mod- ern scholarly and professorial mind than £ stipend.' (I have twice a year at present to consider whether I am worth inine j gent with compliments from the Curators of the University chest). — Now, this word comes from 'stips,' small pay, which itself comes from ' stipo,' to press together, with the idea of small coin heaped up in little towers or piles. But with the idea of lateral pressing together, instead of downward, we get 6 stipes,' a solid log ; in Greek, with the same sense, o-rvVos, (stupos,) whence, gradually, with help from another word meaning to beat, (and a side-glance at beating of hemp,) w T e get our 'stupid,' the German stumph, the Scottish sumph, and the plain English ; stump.' Befining on the more delicate sound of stipes, the Latins THE STEM. 105 got 'stipula,' the thin stem of straw : which rustles and rip- ples daintily in verse, associated with spica and spiculum, used of the sharp pointed ear of corn, and its fine processes of fairy shafts. 28. There are yet two more names of stalk to be studied, though, except for particular plants, not needing to be used, — namely, the Latin cau-dex, and cau-lis, both connected with the Greek Kav\6s, properly meaning a solid stalk like a handle, passing into the sense of the hilt of a sword, or quill of a pen. Then, in Latin, caudex passes into the sense of log, and so, of cut plank or tablet of wood ; thus finally be- coming the classical c codex ' of writings engraved on such wooden tablets, and therefore generally used for authoritative manuscripts. Lastly, 'caulis,' retained accurately in our cauliflower, con- tracted in 'colewort,' and refined in c kail,' softens itself into the French ' chou,' meaning properly the whole family of thick-stalked eatable salads with spreading heads ; but these being distinguished explicitly by Pliny as £ Capitati,' * salads with a head/ or \ Captain salads,' the mediaeval French soft- ened the £ caulis capitatus ' into £ chou cabus ; ' — or, to sepa- rate the round or apple-like mass of leaves from the flowery foam, ' cabus ' simply, by us at last enriched and emphasized into 1 cabbage.' 29. I believe we have now got through the stiffest piece of etymology we shall have to master in the course of our botany ; but I am certain that young readers will find patient work, in this kind, well rewarded by the groups of connected thoughts which will thus attach themselves to familiar names ; and their grasp of every language they learn must only be esteemed by them secure when they recognize its deriva- tives in these homely associations, and are as much at ease with the Latin or French syllables of a word as with the Eng- lish ones ; this familiarity being above all things needful to cure our young students of their present ludicrous impres- sion that what is simple, in English, is knowing, in Greek ; and that terms constructed out of a dead language will ex- plain difficulties which remained insoluble in a living one 106 PROSERPINA. But Greek is not yet dead : while if we carry our unscholarly nomenclature much further, English soon will be ; and then doubtless botanical gentlemen at Athens will for some time think it fine to describe what we used to call caryophyllace^e, as the eSA^tSes. 30. For indeed w T e are all of us yet but school-boys, clum- sily using alike our lips and brains ; and with all our mastery of instruments and patience of attention, but few have reached, and those dimly, the first level of science, — wonder. For the first instinct of the stem, — unnamed by us yet— un thought of, — the instinct of seeking light, as of the root to seek darkness, — what words can enough speak the wonder of it. Look. Here is the little thing, Line-study V. (A), in its first birth to us : the stem of stems ; the one of which we pray that it may bear our daily bread. The seed has fallen in the ground with the springing germ of it downwards ; with heavenly cunning the taught stem curls round, and seeks the never-seen light. Veritable 1 conversion/ miraculous, called of God. And here is the oat germ, (B) — after the wheat, most vital of divine gifts ; and assuredly, in days to come, fated to grow on many a naked rock in hitherto lifeless lands, over which the glancing sheaves of it will shake sweet treasure of innocent gold. And who shall tell us how they grow ; and the fashion of their rustling pillars — bent, and again erect, at every breeze. Fluted shaft or clustered pier, how poor of art, beside this grass-shaft — built, first to sustain the food of men, then to be strewn under their feet ! We must not stay to think of it, yet, or we shall get no far- ther till harvest has come and gone again. And having our names of stems now determined enough, we must in next chapter try a little to understand the different kinds of them. The following notes, among many kindly sent me on the subject of Scottish Heraldry, seem to be the most trust- worthy : "The earliest known mention of the thistle as the national badge of Scotland is in the inventory of the effects of James III., who probably adopted it as an appropriate illustration of the royal motto, hi defence. OUTSIDE AND IN. 10? • " Thistles occur on the coins of James IV., Mary, James V., and James VI. ; and on those of James VI. they are for the first time accompanied by the motto, Nemo me impune lacessit. " A collar of thistles appears on the gold bonnet-pieces of James V. of 1539 ; and the royal ensigns, as depicted in Sir David Lindsay's armorial register of 1542, are surrounded by a collar formed entirely of golden thistles, with an oval badge attached. 4 1 This collar, however, was a mere device until the institution, or, as it is generally but inaccurately called, the revival, of the order of the Thistle by James VII. (II. of England), which took place on May 29, 1687." Date of James IIL's reign 1460—1488. CHAPTER IX. OUTSIDE AND IN. 1. The elementary study of methods of growth, given in the following chapter, has been many years written, (the greater part soon after the fourth volume of ' Modern Paint- ers ') ; and ought now to be rewritten entirely ; but having no time to do this, I leave it with only a word or two of modifi- cation, because some truth and clearness of incipient notion will be conveyed by it to young readers, from which I can afterwards lop the errors, and into which I can graft the finer facts, better than if I had a less blunt embryo to begin with. 2. A stem, then, broadly speaking, (I had thus began the old chapter,) is the channel of communication between the leaf and root ; and if the leaf can grow directly from the root there is no stem : so that it is well first to conceive of all plants as consisting of leaves and roots only, with the condi- tion that each leaf must have its own quite particular root * somewhere. Let a b c, Fig. 16, be three leaves, each, as you see, with its own root, and by no means dependent on other leaves for its * Recent botanical research makes this statement more than dubitable. Nevertheless, on no other supposition can the forms and action of tree- branches, so far as at present known to me, be yet clearly accounted for. 108 PROSERPINA. daily bread ; and let the horizontal line be the surface of the ground. Then the plant has no stem, or an underground one. But if the three leaves rise above the ground, as in Fig. 17, they must reach their roots by elongating their stalks, and this elongation is the stem of the plant. If the outside leaves grow last, and are therefore youngest, the plant is said to grow from the outside. You know that ' ex ' means out, and that 'gen' is the first syllable of Genesis (or creation), there- fore the old botanists, putting an o between the two syllables, called the plants whose outside leaves grew last, Ex-o-gens. If the inside leaf grow T s last, and is youngest, the plant was said to grow from the inside, and from the Greek Endon, within, called an ' Endo-gen.' If these names are persisted in, the c Fig. 16. Fig. 17. Greek botanists, to return the compliment, will of course call Endogens 'WeiS/Sopi/ISes, and Exogens "Oirro-etS/^opviScs. In the Oxford school, they will be called simply Inlaid and Out- laid. 3. You see that if the outside leaves are to grow last, they may conveniently grow two at a time ; which they accordingly do, and exogens always start with two little leaves from their roots, and may therefore conveniently be called two-leaved ; which, if you please, we will for our parts call them. The botanists call them ' two-suckered,' and can't be content to call them that in English ; but drag in a long Greek word, mean- ing the fleshy sucker of the sea-devil, — c cotyledon/ which, however, I find is practically getting shortened into ' cot,' and that they will have to end by calling endogens, monocots, and OUTSIDE AJSII) IN. 109 exogens, bicots. I mean steadily to call them one-leaved and two-leaved, for this further reason, that they differ not merely in the single or dual springing of first leaves from \ the seed ; but in the distinctly single or dual ar- rangement of leaves afterwards on the stem ; so that, through all the complexity obtained by alternate and spiral placing, every bicot or two-leaved flower or tree is in reality composed of dual groups of leaves, sep- arated by a given length of stem ; as, most charac- teristically in this pure mountain type of the Ragged Robin (Clarissa laciniosa), Fig. 18 ; and compare A, and B, Lines-tudy II. ; while, on the other hand, the monocot plants are by close analysis, I think, always resolvable into successively climbing leaves, sessile on one another, and sending their roots, or processes, for nourishment, down I through one another, as in Fig. 19. 4. Not that I am yet clear, at all, my- self ; but I do think it's more the botan- ists' fault than mine, what ■ cotyiedonous'' structure there may be at the outer base of each successive bud ; and still less, how Ji the intervenient length of stem, in the f IG f 19, W bicots, is related to their power, or law, of branching. For not only the two-leaved tree is outlaid, and the one-leaved inlaid, but the two-leaved tree is branched, and the one-leaved tree is not branched. This is a most vital and important distinction, w f hich I state to you in very bold terms, for though there are some apparent exceptions to the law, there are, I believe, no real ones, if we define a branch rightly. Thus, the head of a palm tree is merely a cluster of large , leaves ; and the spike of a grass, a clustered blossom. The stem, in both, is unbranched ; and we should be able in this respect to classify plants very simply in- fig. is. deed, but for a provoking species of intermediate creatures whose branching is always in the manner of corals, or sponges, or arborescent minerals, irregular and accidental, 110 PROSERPINA. and essentially, therefore, distinguished from the systematic anatomy of a truly branched tree. Of these presently ; we must go on by very short steps : and I find no step can be taken without check from existing generalizations. Sowerby's definition of Monocotyledons, in his ninth volume, begins thus: "Herbs, (or rarely, and only in exotic genera,) trees, in which the wood, pith, and bark are indistinguishable." Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush ; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether ! We cannot advance too slowly. 5. In the families of one-leaved plants in which the young leaves grow directly out of the old ones, it be- comes a grave question for them whether the old ones are to lie flat or edgeways, and whether they must therefore grow out of their faces or their edges. And we must at once understand the way they contrive it, in either case. Among the many forms taken by the Arethusan leaf, one of the commonest is long and gradually tapering, — much broader at the base than the point. We will take such an one for examination, and suppose that it is growing on the ground as in Fig. 20, with a root to its every fibre. Cut out a piece of strong paper roughly into the shape of this Arethusan leaf, a, Fig. 21. Now suppose the next young leaf has to spring out of the front of this one, at about the middle of its height. Give it two nicks with the scissors at b b ; then roll up the lower part into a cylinder, (it will overlap a good deal at the bottom,) and tie it fast with a fine thread : so, you will get the form at c. Then bend the top of it back, so that, seen sideways, it appears as at d, and you see you have made quite a little flower-pot to plant your new leaf in, and perhaps it may occur to you that you have seen something like this before. Now make another, a little less wide, but with the part for the cylinder twice as long, roll it np in the game way, and slio it inside the other, OUTSIDE AND IN Ill with the flat part turned the other way, e. Surely this re- minds you now of something you have seen ? Or must I draw the something (Fig. 22) ? 6. All grasses are thus constructed, and have their leaves set thus, opposite, on the sides of their tubular stems, alter- nately, as they ascend. But in most of them there is also a peculiar construction, by which, at the base of the sheath, or enclosing tube, each leaf articulates itself with the rest of the stem at a ringed knot, or joint. Fig. 21. Before examining these, remember there are mainly two sorts of joints in the framework of the bodies of animals. One is that in which the bone is thick at the joints and thin between them, (see the bone of the next chicken leg you eat), the other is that of animals that have shells or horny coats, in which characteristically the shell is thin at the joints, and thick between them (look at the next lobster's claw you can see, without eating). You know, also, that though the crus- taceous are titled only from their crusts, the name ' insect * 112 PROSERPINA. is given to the whole insect tribe, because they are farther jointed almost into sections : it is easily remembered, also, that the projecting joint means strength and elasticity in the creature, and that all its limbs are useful to it, and cannot conveniently be parted with ; and that the incised, sectional, or insectile joint means more or less weakness,* and necklace-like laxity or license in the creature's make ; and an ignoble power of shaking off its legs or arms on occasion, coupled also with modes of growth involving occasionally quite astonishing transformations, and beginnings of new life under new circumstances ; so that, until very lately, no mortal knew what a crab was like in its youth, the very existence of the creature, as well as its legs, being jointed, as it were, and made in separate pieces with the narrowest possible thread of con- | | | nection between them ; and its principal, or ti stomachic, period of life, connected with its senti- mental period by as thin a thread as a wasp's stomach is with its thorax. 7. Now in plants, as in animals, there are just the same opposed aspects of joint, with this special- ty of difference in function, that the animal's limb bends at the joints, but the vegetable limb stiffens. And when the articulation projects, as in the joint of a cane, it means not only that the strength of the plant is well carried through the junction, but is carried farther and more safely than it could be without it : a cane is stronger, and can stand higher than it could otherwise, because of its joints. Also, this structure implies that the plant has a will of its own, and a position which on the whole it will keep, how- ever it may now and then be bent out of it ; and that it has a continual battle, of a healthy and humanlike kind, to wage with surrounding elements. * Not always in muscular power ; but the framework on which strong muscles are to act, as that of an insect's wing, or its jaw, is never in- sectile. Fig. 22. OUTSIDE AND IN. 113 But the crabby, or insect-like, joint, which you get in sea- weeds and cacti, means either that the plant is to be dragged and wagged here and there at the will of waves, and to have no spring nor mind of its own ; or else that it has at least no springy intention and elasticity of purpose, but only a knobby, knotty, prickly, malignant stubbornness, and incoherent opin- iativeness ; crawling about, and coggling, and grovelling, and aggregating anyhow, like the minds of so many people whom one knows ! 8. Keturning then to our grasses, in which the real rooting and junction of the leaves with each other is at these joints ; we find that therefore every leaf of grass may be thought of as consisting of two main parts, for which we shall want two separate names. The lowest part, which wraps itself round to become strong, we will call the ' staff/ and for the free- floating outer part we will take specially the name given at present carelessly to a large number of the plants themselves, 'flag.' This will give a more clear meaning to the words 'rod' (virga), and 'staff' (baculus), when they occur together, as in the 23rd Psalm ; and remember the distinction is that a rod bends like a switch, but a staff is stiff. I keep the well- known name c blade ' for grass-leaves in their fresh green state. 9. You felt, as you were bending down the paper into the form d, Fig. 21, the difficulty and awkwardness of the transi- tion from the tubular form of the staff to the flat one of the flag. The mode in which this change is effected is one of the most interesting features in plants, for you will find presently that the leaf-stalk in ordinary leaves is only a means of accom- plishing the same change from round to flat. But you know I said just now that some leaves were not flat, but set upright, edgeways. It is not a common position in two-leaved frees ; but if you can run out and look at an arbor vitae, it may interest you to see its hatchet-shaped vertically crested cluster of leaves transforming themselves gradually downwards into branches ; and in one-leaved trees the vertically edged group is of great importance. 10. Cut out another piece of paper like a in Fig. 21, but PROSERPINA. now, instead of merely giving it nicks at a, b, cut it into the shape A, Fig. 23. Eoll the lower part up as before, but in- stead of pulling the upper part clown, pinch its back at the dotted line, and bring the two points, a and b, forward, so that they may touch each other. B shows the look of the thing half-done, before the points a and b have quite met Pinch them close, and stitch the two edges neatly together, all the way from a to the point c ; then roll and tie up the lower part as before. You will find then that the back or spinal line of the whole leaf is bent forward, as at B. Now go out to the garden and gather the green leaf of a fleur-de- lys, and look at it and your piece of disciplined paper together ; and I fancy you will probably find out several things for yourself that I want you to know. 11. You see, for one thing, at once, how strong the fleur-de-lys leaf is, and that it is just twice as strong as a blade of grass, for it is the substance of the staff, with its sides flattened together, while the grass blade is a staff cut open and flattened out. And you see that as a grass blade necessarily flaps down, the fleur- de-lys leaf as necessarily curves up, owing to that inevitable bend in its back. And you see, with its keen edge, and long- curve, and sharp point, how like a sword it is. The botanists would for once have given a really good and right name to the plants which have this kind of leaf, 'Ensatae,' from the Latin 4 ensis,' a sword ; if only sata had been properly formed from sis. "We can't let the rude Latin stand, but you may remem- ber that the fleur-de-lys, which is the flower of chivalry, has a sword for its leaf, and a lily for its heart. 12. In case you cannot gather a fleur-de-lys leaf, I have drawn for you, in Plate VI., a cluster of such leaves, w r hich are as pretty as any, and so small that, missing the points of a Fig. 23. OUTSIDE AND IN. 115 few, I can draw them of their actual size. You see the pretty alternate interlacing at the bottom, and if you can draw at all, and will try to outline their curves, you will find what subtle lines they are. I did not know this name for the strong- edged grass leaves when I wrote the pieces about shield and sword leaves in 'Modern Painters ' ; I wish I had chanced in those passages on some other similitude, but I can't alter them now, and my trustful pupils may avoid all confusion of thought by putting gladius for ensis, and translating it by the word ' scymitar,' which is also more accurate in expressing the curvature blade. So we will call the ensatse, instead, 1 gladiolse,' translating, £ scymitar-grasses.' And having now got at some clear idea of the distinction between outlaid and inlaid growth in the stem, the reader will find the elementary analy- sis of forms resulting from outlaid growth in ' Modern Paint- ers ' ; and I mean to republish it in the sequel of this book, but must go on to other matters here. The growth of the inlaid stem we will follow as far as we need, for English plants, in examining the grasses. Florence, 11th September, 1874. As I correct this chapter for press, I find it is too imperfect to be let go without a word or two more. #In the first place, I have not enough, in distinguishing the nature of the living yearly shoot, with its cluster of fresh leafage, from that of the accumulated mass of perennial trees, taken notice of the similar power even of the anuual shoot, to obtain some man- ner of immortality for itself, or at least of usefulness, after death. A Tuscan woman stopped me on the path up to Fie- sole last night, to beg me to buy her plaited straw. I wonder how long straw lasts, if one takes care of it ? A Leghorn bonnet, (if now such things are,) carefully put away, — even properly taken care of when it is worn, — how long will it last, young ladies ? I have just been reading the fifth chapter of II. Esdras, and am fain to say, with less discomfort than otherwise I might have felt, (the example being set me by the archangel Uriel,) u I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know." How old is 116 PROSERPINA. the oldest straw known ? the oldest linen ? the oldest hemp V We have mummy wheat, — cloth of papyrus, which is a kind of straw. The paper reeds by the brooks, the flax-flower in the field, leave such imperishable frame behind them. And Ponte-della-Paglia, in Venice ; and Straw Street, of Paris, re- membered in Heaven, — there is no occasion to change their names, as one may have to change ' Waterloo Bridge,' or the * Rue de lTmperatrice.' Poor Empress ! Had she but known that her true dominion was in the straw streets of her fields ; not in the stone streets of her cities ! But think how wonderful this imperishableness of the stem of many plants is, even in their annual work : how much more in their perennial work ! The noble stability between death and life, of a piece of perfect wood ? It cannot grow, but will not decay ; keeps record of its years of life, but surren- ders them to become a constantly serviceable thing : which may be sailed in, on the sea, built with, on the land, carved by Donateilo, painted on by Fra Angelico. And it is not the wood's fault, but the fault of Florence in not taking proper care of it, that the panel of Sandro Botticelli's loveliest pict- ure has cracked, (not with heat, I believe, but blighting frost), a quarter of an inch wide through the Madonna's face. But what is this strange state of undecaying wood ? What sort of latent life has it, which it only finally parts with when it rots ? Nay, what is the law by w T hich its natural life is measured ? What makes a tree 1 old ' ? One sees the Spanish-chestnut trunks among the Apennines growing into caves, instead of logs. Vast hollows, confused among the recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go on, and on, — hollowing itself into a Fairy — no — a Dryad, Ring, — till it becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree ? Truly, " I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know." The worst of it is, however, that I don't know one thing which I ought very thoroughly to have known at least thirty years ago, namely, the true difference in the way of building the trunk in outlaid and inlaid wood. I have an idea that the OUTSIDE AND IN 117 stem of a palm-tree is only a heap of leaf-roots built up like a tower of bricks, year by year, and that the palm-tree really grows on the top of it, like a bunch of fern ; but I've no books here, and no time to read them if I had. If only I were a stronge giant, instead of a thin old gentleman of fifty-five, how I should like to pull up one of those little palm-trees by the roots — (by the way, what are the roots of a palm like ? and, how does it stand in sand, where it is wanted to stand, mostly? Fancy, not knowing that, at fifty-five !) — that grow all along the Riviera ; and snap its stem in two, and cut it down the middle. But I suppose there are sections enough now in our grand botanical collections, and you can find it all out for yourself. That you should be able to ask a question clearly, is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered ; and I think this chapter of mine will at least enable you to ask some questions about the stem, though what a stem is, truly, * ' I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know." Knaresborougu, 30^ April, 1876. I see by the date of last paragraph that this chapter has been in my good Aylesbury printer's type for more than a year and a half. At this rate, Proserpina has a distant chance of being finished in the spirit-land, with more accurate infor- mation derived from the archangel Uriel himself, (not that he is likely to know much about the matter, if he keeps on let- ting himself be prevented from ever seeing foliage in spring- time by the black demon-winds,) about the year 2000. In the meantime, feeling that perhaps I am sent to tell my readers a little more than is above told, I have had recourse to my bo- tanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me, first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which sempstress work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on it ; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and multiplica- tion of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be described as c sending down roots from the leaf to the ground.' I suspected as much in beginning to revise this chapter ; but 118 PROSERPINA. hold to my judgment in not cancelling it. For this multipli- cation of the cells is at least compelled by an influence which passes from the leaf to the ground, and vice versa ; and which is at present best conceivable to me by imagining the contin- ual and invisible descent of lightning from electric cloud by a conducting rod, endowed w T ith the power of softly splitting the rod into two rods, each as thick as the original one, Studying microscopically, we should then see the molecules of copper, as we see the cells of the wood, dividing and in- creasing, each one of them into two. But the visible result, and mechanical conditions of growth, would still be the same as if the leaf actually sent down a new root fibre ; and, more than this, the currents of accumulating substance, marked by the grain of the wood, are, I think, quite plainly and abso- lutely those of streams flowing only from the leaves down- wards ; never from the root up, nor of mere lateral increase. I must look over all my drawings again, and at tree stems again, with more separate study of the bark and pith in those museum sections, before I can assert this ; but there will be no real difficulty in the investigation. If the increase of the wood is lateral only, the currents round the knots will be compressed at the sides, and open above and below ; but if downwards, compressed above the knot and open below it. The nature of the force itself, and the manner of its ordi- nances in direction, remain, and must for ever remain, inscru- table as our own passions, in the hand of the God of ail Spirits, and of all Flesh. u Drunk is each ridge, of thy cup drinking, Each clod relenteth at thy dressing, Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking, Fair spring sproutes forth, blest with thy blessing ; The fertile year is with thy bounty crouned, And where thou go'st, thy goings fat the ground. Plenty bedews the desert places, A hedge of mirth the hills encloseth, The fields with flockes have hid their faces, A robe of corn the valleys clotheth. Deserts and hills and fields and valleys all, Eejoice, shout, sing, and on thy name do call." THE BARK. 119 CHAPTEE X. THE BARK. 1. Philologists are continually collecting instances, like our friend the French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin of unfinished, in the imitation of nat- ural sounds. But such collections give an entirely false idea of the real power of language, unless they are balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such imi- tative virtue, and w T hose sound, if one dwelt upon it, is de- structive of their meaning. 2. For instance. Few sounds are mox*e distinct in their kind, or one would think more likely to be vocally reproduced in the word which signified them, than that of a swift rent in strongly woven cloth ; and the English words ' rag ' and rag- ged, with the Greek p^yw/u, do indeed in a measure recall the tormenting effect upon the ear. But it is curious that th6r) 8e viroir6p