IV. THE FLOWEK. 67 



them flowers ; they get together in knots, and one calls 

 them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence alto- 

 gether ; I haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, 

 what an oak blossom 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 it 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 embar- 

 rassment, 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 company'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 way- 

 wardly, is the most subtle part of their order, and the 

 most difficult to represent. Take that cluster of bog- 

 heather bells, for instance, 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 



