110 PROSERPINA. 



keep at home. You have no trouble in c keeping down 

 the spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, 

 and makes the earth as like heaven as it can, but yields as 

 softly as the air, if you want it to give place. Here in 

 England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors, above 

 the high force of Tees ; its Latin name, for us (I may as 

 well tell you at once) is to be Lucia verna ; ' and its 

 English one, Lucy of Teesdale. 



8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and 

 able to live anywhere, and yet be no weed. The colts- 

 foot, so far as I know, is the first of large-leaved plants to 

 grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed : fall of 

 Alpine debris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of 

 drifted slime by flood, it seeks to heal and redeem ; but it 

 does not offend us in our gardens, nor impoverish us in 

 our fields. 



Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscrimi- 

 nate hardihood, is at least a point of some unworthiness in 

 a plant. That it should have no choice of home, no love 

 of native land, is ungentle; much more if such discrimi- 

 nation as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to 

 open and much-traversed places^where it may be continu- 

 ally seen of strangers. The tormentilla gleams in show- 

 ers along the mountain turf; her delicate crosslets are 

 separate, though constellate, as the rubied daisy. But 

 the king-cup (blessing be upon it always no less) 

 crowds itself sometimes into too burnished flame of inevi- 

 table gold. I don't know if there was anything in tho 



