90 PROSERPINA. 



don't find a single note of its preferences or antipathies 

 in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it 

 chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to 

 which it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines. 



9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at 

 Brantwood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond 

 any other little blossom I know of. In laying out the 

 rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to 

 remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of 

 stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that 

 likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself. But 

 at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathemati- 

 cally true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed 

 with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept 

 duly trim by the scythe. And only on this terrace does 

 the Gmlietta choose to show herself, and even there, 

 not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in 

 one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected 

 sky through cloud ; and entirely refusing to allow either 

 bank or terrace to be mown the least trim during her 

 time of disport there. So spared and indulged, there 

 are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds ; 

 no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by 

 watch through day and night, than her recumbent clus- 

 ters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the 

 grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue. 



10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varie- 

 ties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and 





