643 



round openings pierced in it, and through these emergent, a slender, 

 pensive, fragile flower,* whose small, dark purple, fringed bell hangs 

 down and shudders over the icy cleft that it has cloven, as if partly 

 wondering at its own recent grave, and partly dying of very fatigue 

 after its hard-won victory ; we shall be, or we ought to be, moved by 

 a totally different impression of loveliness from that which we receive 

 among the dead ice and the idle clouds. There is now uttered to us 

 a call for sympathy, now offered to us an image of moral purpose and 

 achievement, which, however unconscious or senseless the creature 

 may indeed be that so seems to call, cannot be heard without affec- 

 tion, nor contemplated without worship, by any of us whose heart is 

 rightly tuned, or whose mind is clearly and surely sighted." — p. 84. 

 " As we pass from those beings of whose happiness and pain we 

 are certain, to those in which it is doubtful or only seeming, as pos- 

 sibly in plants (though I would fain hold, if I might, * the faith that 

 every flower enjoys the air it breathes,' neither do I ever crush or ga- 

 ther one without some pain), yet our feeling for them has in it more 

 of sympathy than of actual love, as receiving from them in delight far 

 more than we can give ; for love, I think, chiefly grows in giving, at 

 least its essence is the desire of doing good, or giving happiness, and 

 we cannot feel the desire of that which we cannot conceive, so that if 

 we conceive not of a plant as capable of pleasure, w^e cannot desire 

 to give it pleasure, that is, we cannot love it in the entire sense of the 

 term. Nevertheless, the sympathy of every lofty and sensitive mind 

 usually reaches so far as to the conception of life in the f)lant, and so 

 to love, as with Shelly, of the sensitive plant, and Shakespeare always, 

 as he has taught us in the sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita, and 

 Wordsworth always, as of the daffodils and the celandine. 



' It doth not love the shower nor seek the cold. 

 This neither is its courage nor its choice, 

 But its necessity in being old.' 



And so all other great poets (that is to say, great seers) ; nor do I be- 

 lieve that any mind, however rude, is without some slight perception 

 or acknowledgment of joyousness in breathless things, as most cer- 

 tainly there are none but feel instinctive delight in the appearances of 

 such enjoyment. 



" For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the characters 

 of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form 

 is in proportion to its appearance of healthy, vital energy j as in a 



* Soldanella alpina. 



