THE BEAUTY OF FLOWERS 289 



the manner in which they are treated. There are, 

 for instance, broad differences of character between 

 monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous flowers, be- 

 tween Irises and Lilies and Tulips and Narcissi on 

 the one hand, and Roses and Pinks and Campanulas 

 on the other. The beauty of the monocotyledons is 

 both simpler and more mysterious than the beauty 

 of the dicotyledons. The dicotyledons are usually 

 inferior in purity both of colour and of form; and 

 yet we are apt to love them better, because with less 

 perfection they seem in their greater complexity to 

 be nearer to human beings. There is something 

 strange and remote even in so familiar a flower as 

 the German Iris. Its beauty beside that of the Rose 

 is like the beauty of the sea compared with the beauty 

 of the earth. Everything about it seems mutable 

 and unsubstantial, as if it had been made by enchant- 

 ment and might vanish by the same means. Iris 

 colours are liquid or cloudy. It has got its very 

 name from a beauty of the sky. But the colours of 

 the Rose, though less pure, seem to be more fixed. 

 One cannot think of them as flushing and then fading 

 again like a rainbow; and the whole plant looks as 

 if it were firmly rooted in the earth and had grown 

 slowly out of it by a natural process, not by any en- 

 chantment. The Iris, leaf and flower, seems to be all 

 of a piece and created at a stroke; so do the Tulip 

 and the Narcissus and the Lily. There is a much 

 stronger difference in the parts of a Rose and much 

 more wayward variety of growth. In the flowers of 



