128 PEOBEKPINA. 



2. I suppose there is no question but that all nice 

 people like hawthorn blossom. 



I want, if I can, to find out to-day, 25th May, 1875, 

 what it is we like it so much for : holding these two 

 branches of it in my hand one full out, the other in 

 youth. This full one is a mere mass of symmetrically 

 balanced snow, one was going vaguely to write, in the 

 first impulse. But it is nothing of the sort. White, yes, 

 in a high degree ; and pure, totally ; but not at all daz- 

 zling in the white, nor pure in an insultingly rivalless 

 manner, as snow would be ; yet pure somehow, certainly ; 

 and white, absolutely, in spite of what might be thought 

 failure, imperfection nay. even distress and loss in it. 

 For every little rose of it has a green darkness in the cen- 

 tre not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish, 

 glutinous, unaccomplished green ; and round that, all 

 over the surface of the blossom, whose shell-like petals are 

 themselves deep sunk, with grey shadows in the hollows 

 of them all above this already subdued brightness, are 

 strewn the dark points of the dead stamens manifest 

 more and more, the longer one looks, as a kind of grey 

 sand, sprinkled without sparing over what looked at first 

 unspotted light. And in all the ways of it the lovely 

 thing is more like the spring frock of some prudent little 

 maid of fourteen, than a flower ; frock with some little 

 spotty pattern on it to keep it from showing an unin- 

 tended and inadvertent spot, if Fate should ever inflict 

 such a thing ! Undeveloped, thinks Mr. Darwin, the poor 



