11. Verna. D. 252. Mountains, in dry places in early spring. Upright, and confused in the leafage, which is sharp-pointed and close set, much hiding the blossom, but of extreme elegance, fit for a sacred foreground; as any gentle student will feel, who copies this outline from the Flora Danica, Fig. 5.
12. Peregrina. Another extremely small variety, nearly pink in colour, passing into bluish lilac and white. American; but called, I do not see why, 'Veronique voyageuse,' by the French, and Fremder Ehrenpreis in Germany. Given as a frequent English weed in S. 927.
13. Alpina. Veronique des Alpes. Gebirgs Ehrenpreis. Still minute; its scarcely distinct flowers forming a close head among the leaves; round-petalled in D. 16, but sharp, as usual, in S. 980. On the Norway Alps in grassy places; and in Scotland by the side of mountain rills; but rare. On Ben Nevis and Lachin y Gair (S.)
14. Scutellata. From the shield-like shape of its seed-vessels. Veronique à Ecusson; Schildfruchtiger Ehrenpreis. But the seed-vessels are more heart shape than shield. Marsh Speedwell. S. 988, D. 209,—in the one pink, in the other blue; but again in D. 1561, pink.
"In flooded meadows, common." (D.) A spoiled and scattered form; the seeds too conspicuous, but the flowers very delicate, hence 'Gratiola minima' in Gesner. The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, in relation to the equally straggling fibres of root.
15. Spicata. S. 982: very prettily done, representing the inside of the flower as deep blue, the outside pale. The top of the spire, all calices, the calyx being indeed, through all the veronicas, an important and persistent member.
The tendency to arrange itself in spikes is to be noted as a degradation of the veronic character; connecting it on one side with the snapdragons, on the other with the ophryds. In Veronica Ophrydea, (C. 2210,) this resemblance to the contorted tribe is carried so far that "the corolla of the veronica becomes irregular, the tube gibbous, the faux (throat) hairy, and three of the laciniæ (lobes of petals) variously twisted." The spire of blossom, violet-coloured, is then close set, and exactly resembles an ophryd, except in being sharper at the top. The engraved outline of the blossom is good, and very curious.
16. Gentianoides. This is the most directly and curiously imitative among the—shall we call them—'histrionic' types of Veronica. It grows exactly like a clustered upright gentian; has the same kind of leaves at its root, and springs with the same bright vitality among the retiring snows of the Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be the same, it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as large as an asphodel, and with root-leaves half a foot long.
The petals are much veined; and this, of all veronicas, has the lower petal smallest in proportion to the three above,—"triplò aut quadruplò minori." (G.)
17. Stagnarum. Marsh-Veronica. The last four families we have been examining vary from the typical Veronicas not only in their lance-shaped clusters, but in their lengthened, and often every way much enlarged leaves also: and the two which we now will take in association, 17 and 18, carry the change in aspect farthest of any, being both of them true water-plants, with strong stems and thick leaves. The present name of my Veronica Stagnarum is however V. anagallis, a mere insult to the little water primula, which one plant of the Veronica would make fifty of. This is a rank water-weed, having confused bunches of blossom and seed, like unripe currants, dangling from the leaf-axils. So that where the little triphylla, (No. 7, above,) has only one blossom, daintily set, and well seen, this has a litter of twenty-five or thirty on a long stalk, of which only three or four are well out as flowers, and the rest are mere knobs of bud or seed. The stalk is thick (half an inch round at the bottom), the leaves long and misshapen. "Frequens in fossis," D. 203. French, Mouron d'Eau, but I don't know the root or exact meaning of Mouron.
An ugly Australian species, 'labiata,' C. 1660, has leaves two inches long, of the shape of an aloe's, and partly aloeine in texture, "sawed with unequal, fleshy, pointed teeth."
18. Fontium. Brook-Veronica. Brook-Lime, the Anglo-Saxon 'lime' from Latin limus, meaning the soft mud of streams. German 'Bach-bunge' (Brook-purse?) ridiculously changed by the botanists into 'Beccabunga,' for a Latin name! Very beautiful in its crowded green leaves as a stream-companion; rich and bright more than watercress. See notice of it at Matlock, in 'Modern Painters,' vol. v.
19. Clara. Veronique des rochers. Saxatilis, I suppose, in Sowerby, but am not sure of having identified that with my own favourite, for which I therefore keep the name 'Clara,' (see above, § 9); and the other rock variety, if indeed another, mast be remembered, together with it.
20. Glauca. G. 7. And this, at all events, with the Clara, is to be remembered as closing the series of twenty families, acknowledged by Proserpina. It is a beautiful low-growing ivy-leaved type, with flowers of subdued lilac blue. On Mount Hymettus: no other locality given in the Flora Græca.
15. I am sorry, and shall always be so, when the varieties of any flower which I have to commend to the student's memory, exceed ten or twelve in number; but I am content to gratify his pride with lengthier task, if indeed he will resign himself to the imperative close of the more inclusive catalogue, and be content to know the twelve, or sixteen, or twenty, acknowledged families, thoroughly; and only in their illustration to think of rarer forms. The object of 'Proserpina' is to make him happily cognizant of the common aspect of Greek and English flowers; under the term 'English,' comprehending the Saxon, Celtic, Norman, and Danish Floras. Of the evergreen shrub alluded to in § 11 above, the Veronica Decussata of the Pacific, which is "a bushy evergreen, with beautifully set cross-leaves, and white blossoms scented like olea fragrans," I should like him only to read with much surprise, and some incredulity, in Pinkerton's or other entertaining travellers' voyages.
16. And of the families given, he is to note for the common simple characteristic, that they are quatrefoils referred to a more or less elevated position on a central stem, and having, in that relation, the lowermost petal diminished, contrary to the almost universal habit of other flowers to develope in such a position the lower petal chiefly, that it may have its full share of light. You will find nothing but blunder and embarrassment result from any endeavour to enter into further particulars, such as "the relation of the dissepiment with respect to the valves of the capsule," etc., etc., since "in the various species of Veronica almost every kind of dehiscence may be observed" (C. under V. perfoliata, 1936, an Australian species). Sibthorpe gives the entire definition of Veronica with only one epithet added to mine, "Corolla quadrifida, rotata, laciniâ infimâ angustiore," but I do not know what 'rotata' here means, as there is no appearance of revolved action in the petals, so far as I can see.
17. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the veronica, there is less to be said than of its natural beauty. I have not been able to discover with what feeling, or at what time, its sacred name was originally given; and the legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance of it, irrational, and therefore incredible. The meaning of the term 'rational,' as applied to a legend or miracle, is, that there has been an intelligible need for the permission of the miracle at the time when it is recorded; and that the nature and manner of the act itself should be comprehensible in the scope. There was thus quite simple need for Christ to feed the multitudes, and to appear to S. Paul; but no need, so far as human intelligence can reach, for the reflection of His features upon a piece of linen which could be seen by not one in a million of the disciples to whom He might more easily, at any time, manifest Himself personally and perfectly. Nor, I believe, has the story of S. Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, as the Speedwell.
18. Yet, the fact being actually so, and this consecration of the veronica being certainly far more ancient and earnest than the faintly romantic and extremely absurd legend of the forget-me-not; the speedwell has assuredly the higher claim to be given and accepted as a token of pure and faithful love, and to be trusted as a sweet sign that the innocence of affection is indeed more frequent, and the appointed destiny of its faith more fortunate, than our inattentive hearts have hitherto discerned.
19. And this the more, because the recognized virtues and uses of the plant are real and manifold; and the ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth of life connected with it by the German popular name 'Honour-prize'; while to the heart of the British race, the same thought is brought home by Shakespeare's adoption of the flower's Welsh name, for the faithfullest common soldier of his ideal king. As a lover's pledge, therefore, it does not merely mean memory;—for, indeed, why should love be thought of as such at all, if it need to promise not to forget?—but the blossom is significant also of the lover's best virtues, patience in suffering, purity in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in truth: and therefore I make it, worthily, the clasping and central flower of the Cytherides.
GIULIETTA.
1. Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one's fancy,—and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of them?—if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted life to be found in their native places when we travelled. So long as I had crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther horticulture,—and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.
2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,—whether indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I cannot judge;—but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing, Daily news in hand, with a young officer—her fortunate vis-à-vis—on the subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]
3. I will not, in presenting—it must not be called the other side, but the supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,—oppose, as I fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself, at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary modification of the night air.
4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets, carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the 'quinze minutes d'arret' revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of the station at Dijon.
5. And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we run out again southwards: and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more complacently asleep,—and the sun is really up by the time one has to change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux, through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful, not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone and the Salève seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness; till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.
6. That is the journey as it is now,—and as, for me, it must be; except on foot, since there is now no other way of making it. But this was the way we used to manage it in old days:—
Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the least three, usually four—horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot; and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troubling the driver to think of me.
7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judée were mere pyramids of purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the 'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the 'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew. Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.
And on Thursday, the eighth or ninth day from Paris, days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud.
8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of education for youth;—and my certainty that a true knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort, whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges, west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do anything serious,—then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don't find a single note of its preferences or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.
9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of. In laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the scythe. And only on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show herself,—and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be mown the least trim during her time of disport there. So spared and indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.
10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and presumably characteristic forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. If I could but write down the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. In the meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid illness, I must let this piece of 'Proserpina' break off, as most of my work does—and as perhaps all of it may soon do—leaving only suggestion for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.
11. Some essential points respecting the flower I shall note, however, before ending. There is one large and frequent species of it of which the flowers are delicately yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the chief elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy districts of hard Alpine limestone.[26] This is, I believe, the only European type of the large Cape varieties, in all of which, judging from such plates as have been accessible to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less conspicuous than in the smaller species; and the flower almost takes the aspect of a broom-blossom or pease-blossom. In the smaller European varieties, the white fringes of the lower petal are the most important and characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among European wild flowers, absolutely without any likeness of associated structure. The fringes or crests which, towards the origin of petals, so often give a frosted or gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here thrown to the extremity of the petal, and suggest an almost coralline structure of blossom, which in no other instance whatever has been imitated, still less carried out into its conceivable varieties of form. How many such varieties might have been produced if these fringes of the Giulietta, or those already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had been repeated and enlarged; as the type, once adopted for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster! We might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished—or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not to be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness—and consequent survival, of the Thistles and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed Lucias and blue-flushing milkworts out of common human neighbourhood, to live recluse lives with the memories of the abbots of Cluny, and pastors of Piedmont.
12. I have called the Giulietta 'blue-flushing' because it is one of the group of exquisite flowers which at the time of their own blossoming, breathe their colour into the surrounding leaves and supporting stem. Very notably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some of the Vestals, empurpling all their green leaves even to the ground: a quite distinct nature in the flower, observe, this possession of a power to kindle the leaf and stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, or lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos assert themselves in opposition to the blossom, as little pine-leaves, or mosses, or brown paper packages, and the like.
13. The Giulietta, however, is again entirely separate from the other leaf-flushing blossoms, in that, after the two green leaves next the flower have glowed with its blue, while it lived, they do not fade or waste with it, but return to their own former green simplicity, and close over it to protect the seed. I only know this to be the case with the Giulietta Regina; but suppose it to be (with variety of course in the colours) a condition in other species,—though of course nothing is ever said of it in the botanical accounts of them. I gather, however, from Curtis's careful drawings that the prevailing colour of the Cape species is purple, thus justifying still further my placing them among the Cytherides; and I am content to take the descriptive epithets at present given them, for the following five of this southern group, hoping that they may be explained for me afterwards by helpful friends.
14. Bracteolata, C. 345. Oppositifolia, C. 492. Speciosa, C. 1790. These three all purple, and scarcely distinguishable from sweet pease-blossom, only smaller.
Stipulacea, C. 1715. Small, and very beautiful, lilac and purple, with a leaf and mode of growth like rosemary. The "Foxtail" milkwort, whose name I don't accept, C. 1006, is intermediate between this and the next species.
15. Mixta, C. 1714. I don't see what mingling is meant, except that it is just like Erica tetralix in the leaf, only, apparently, having little four-petalled pinks for blossoms. This appearance is thus botanically explained. I do not myself understand the description, but copy it, thinking it may be of use to somebody. "The apex of the carina is expanded into a two-lobed plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This appendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal part of the flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, into common language so far as to add that 'this appendix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every part of the shrub, gives it a pretty lively appearance."
Perhaps this may also be worth extracting.
"Carina, deeply channeled, of a saturated purple within, sides folded together, so as to include and firmly embrace the style and stamens, which, when arrived at maturity, upon being moved, escape elastically from their confinement, and strike against the two erect petals or alæ—by which the pollen is dispersed.
"Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches." (Length or height not told. I imagine like an ordinary heath's.)
The term 'carina,' occurring twice in the above description, is peculiar to the structure of the pease and milk-worts; we will examine it afterwards. The European varieties of the milkwort, except the chamæbuxus, are all minute,—and, their ordinary epithets being at least inoffensive, I give them for reference till we find prettier ones; altering only the Calcarea, because we could not have a 'Chalk Juliet,' and two varieties of the Regina, changed for reason good—her name, according to the last modern refinements of grace and ease in pronunciation, being Eu-vularis, var. genuina! My readers may more happily remember her and her sister as follows:—
16. (I.) Giulietta Regina. Pure blue. The same in colour, form, and size, throughout Europe.
(II.) Giulietta Soror-Reginæ. Pale, reddish-blue or white in the flower, and smaller in the leaf, otherwise like the Regina.
(III.) Giulietta Depressa. The smallest of those I can find drawings of. Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' heads; the leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order.
(IV.) Giulietta Cisterciana. Its present name, 'Calcarea,' is meant, in botanic Latin, to express its growth on limestone or chalk mountains. But we might as well call the South Down sheep, Calcareous mutton. My epithet will rightly associate it with the Burgundian hills round Cluny and Citeaux. Its ground leaves are much larger than those of the Depressa; the flower a little larger, but very pale.
(V.) Giulietta Austriaca. Pink, and very lovely, with bold cluster of ground leaves, but itself minute—almost dwarf. Called 'small bitter milkwort' by S. How far distinct from the next following one, Norwegian, is not told.
The above five kinds are given by Sowerby as British, but I have never found the Austriaca myself.
(VI.) Giulietta Amara. Norwegian. Very quaint in blossom outline, like a little blue rabbit with long ears. D. 1169.
17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter; and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour—blue, red, white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginæ; the red must be the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now, for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called Ambarualis flos. so called because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and Milk-woort."
18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones.
19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster—nor the chance of watching one in seed:—The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of April, and leaves no sign of itself—that I ever found. The botanists tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used to make and handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes fall seeds—too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in the same spot. I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.
20. Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of—Providence, shall we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence? May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly, under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as judge; watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their skill, and inexorable upon their labour.
21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]
22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the original drawings at Oxford for the 'Flora Græca,' or the nobly engraved plates executed in the close of the last century for the 'Flora Danica' and 'Flora Londinensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of the larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two; and had I seen the miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study which are collected in the first and second volumes, published in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work would never have been undertaken.[29] Such as it is, however, I may still, health being granted me, persevere in it; for my own leaf and branch studies express conditions of shade which even these most exquisite botanical plates ignore; and exemplify uses of the pen and pencil which cannot be learned from the inimitable fineness of line engraving. The frontispiece to this number, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest field-thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on smooth grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with white on the nearer thorns, may well surpass the effect of the plate.
23. In the following number of 'Proserpina' I have been tempted to follow, with more minute notice than usual, the 'conditions of adversity' which, as they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the Dragonweed and Nettle: but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of separating the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the microscopic curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor shall this work close, if my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long ago in 'Modern Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England and Italy.
BRUNELLA.
1. It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, § 6, that if the petals, while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form,—and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain clearly leaves, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque or obscure outline,—the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite character as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.[30]
2. I have already enough spoken of the special manifestation of this character in the orders Contorta and Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the reader will find the parallel aspects of the Draconidæ dwelt upon at length in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the 'Queen of the Air,' where also their relation to the labiate group is touched upon. But I am far more embarrassed by the symbolism of that group which I called 'Vestales,' from their especially domestic character and their serviceable purity; but which may be, with more convenience perhaps, simply recognizable as 'Menthæ.'
3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice-bearing trees are in the tropics;—our thyme, lavender, mint, marjoram, and their like, separating themselves not less in the health giving or strengthening character of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet,—than in their humble colours and forms from the grace and splendour of those higher tribes; thus allowing themselves to be summed under the general word 'balm' more truly than the balsams from which the word is derived. Giving the most pure and healing powers to the air around them; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors when dried; not tempting any one to luxury, nor expressive of any kind of exultation. Brides do not deck themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal arches with mint.
4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue sage is the only one of vivid hue at all; and we never think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or bluebell: thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general roughness of the plant.
5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over—the reign of the silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the grass,—the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.
6. Prunell, or Brunell—Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnæus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name—of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English—meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.
7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;—of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether.
8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore—to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged wasps in it,—and perceive therewith the following particulars.
9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe.
Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration—any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest,—and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth,—and yet more, that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen glands.
I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any careful and close observer, which first suggested the use of the plant in throat diseases to physicians; guided, as in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination. Then the German name for one of the most fatal of throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first name of the plant, Brunelle.
10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the healing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as men again desire to lead healthy lives; but I shall not in 'Proserpina' retain any of the names of their gathered and dead or distilled substance, but name them always from the characters of their life. I retain, however, for this plant its name Brunella, Fr. Brunelle, because we may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune; and I bring it here before the reader's attention as giving him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion and disguise of their floral structure. Thus it is not the normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted flower suggests none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself.
11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, with exactitude which has rendered the definition authoritative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and describing them in terms even more depreciatingly imaginative than any I have ventured to use myself. I translate the passage (vol. i., p. 177):—
12. "The name of Labiate flower is given to a single-petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single or double. It is proper to a labiate flower,—first, that it has a one-leaved calyx (ut calycem habeat unifolium), for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper hood (cucullum papyraceum); and, secondly, that its pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their own seed-vessel, by which a labiate flower is distinguished from a personate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided from the calyx (à calyce longò divisam). And a labiate flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which have four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emulous of animal form."
13. This class is then divided into four sections.
In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked—"galeatum est, vel falcatum."
In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon—"cochlearis instar est excavatum."
In the third the upper lip is erect.
And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all.
The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once rejecting a classification of lipped plants into three classes that have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons.
Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divisions, by the form of the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), and then went into the wildest confusion in distinction of species,—sometimes by the form of corolla, sometimes by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, sometimes by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that of the seed. As, for instance, thyme is to be identified by the calyx having hairs in its throat, dead nettle by having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones in its anthers (antheræ punctis osseis adspersæ), and teucrium by having its upper lip cut in two!
14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sections, but as three of these depend on form of corolla, and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the reader may conclude practically, that logical division of the family is impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the smallest occasion for his doing, is first to understand the typical structure thoroughly, and then to know a certain number of forms accurately, grouping the others round them at convenient distances; and, finally, to attach to their known forms such simple names as may be utterable by children, and memorable by old people, with more ease and benefit than the 'Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,' 'Lamium Galeobdalon,' or 'Scutellaria Galericulata,'and the like, of modern botany. But to do this rightly, I must review and amplify some of my former classification, which it will be advisable to do in a separate chapter.