

VII. THE PARABLE OF JOTIIAM. 110 



Sunflowers ; but dedicate,- the daisy to Alcestis alone ; 

 others to Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself : but I 

 can't follow their mythology yet awhile. 



3. Now in these two families you have typically Use 

 opposed to Beauty in wildness / it is their wild ness which 

 is their virtue ; that the thyme is sweet where it is un- 

 thought of, and the daisies red, where the foot despises 

 them : while, in other orders, wildness is their crime, 

 " Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth 

 grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of 

 them you must distinguish between the pure wildness of 

 flowers and their distress. It may not be our duty to tame 

 them ; but it must be, to relieve. 



4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these 

 two chapters, that I had examples given me of distressed 

 and happy wildness, in immediate contrast. The first, 

 I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood, 

 left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became 

 mine. I had to cut my way into it through a mass of 

 thorny ruin ; black, birds-nest like, entanglement of brit- 

 tle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches 

 strangling each other, and changing half into roots among 

 the rock clefts ; knotted stumps of never-blossoming 

 blackthorn, and choked stragglings of holly, all laced and 

 twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost 

 unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and 

 rose, laid over rotten ground through which the water 

 soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into merely unctuous 



