BINDWEED. 199 



the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, I 

 have picked a pretty little convolvulus blos- 

 som, with a fly buried head-foremost in its 

 pink bell ; and I am carrying them both 

 along with me as I go, for contemplation and 

 study. For this little flower, the lesser 

 bindweed, is rich in hints as to the strange 

 ways in which Nature decks herself with so 

 much waste loveliness, whose meaning can 

 only be fully read by the eyes of man, the 

 latest comer among her children. The old 

 school of thinkers imagined that beauty was 

 given to flowers and insects for the sake of 

 man alone : it would not, perhaps, be too 

 much to say that, if the new school be right, 

 the beauty is not in the flowers and insects 

 themselves at all, but is read into them by 

 the fancy of the human race. To the but- 

 terfly the world is a little beautiful ; to the 

 farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful : 

 but to the cultivated man or the artist it is 

 lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every 

 tiny blossom and passing bird. 



