INTRODUCTION. 11 



it last : There was a pretty young English lady at the table- 

 d'hote, in the Hotel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin's,* and I 

 wanted to get speech of her, and didn't know how. So all I 

 could think of was to go half-way up the Aiguille de Varens, 

 to gather St. Bruno's lilies ; and I made a great cluster of 

 them, and put wild roses all around them as I came down. 

 I never saw anything so lovely ; and I thought to present 

 this to her before dinner, but when I got down, she had 

 gone away to Chamouni. My Fors always treated me like 

 that, in affairs of the heart. 



I had begun my studies of Alpine botany just eighteen 

 years before, in 1842, by making a careful drawing of wood- 

 sorrel at Chamouni ; and bitterly sorry I am, now, that the work 

 was interrupted. For I drew, then, very delicately; and should 

 have made a pretty book if I could have got peace. Even 

 yet, I can manage my point a little, and would far rather be 

 making outlines of flowers, than writing ; and I meant to have 

 drawn every English and Scottish wild flower, like this clus- 

 ter of bog heather opposite,! back, and profile, and front. 

 But 'Blackwood's Magazine,' with its insults to Turner, 

 dragged me into controversy ; and I have not had, properly 

 speaking, a day's peace since ; so that in 1868 my botanical 

 studies were advanced only as far as the reader will see in 

 next chapter ; and now, in 1874, must end altogether, I sup- 

 pose, heavier thoughts and work coming fast on me. So that, 

 finding among my notebooks, two or three, full of broken ma- 

 terials for the proposed work on flowers ; and, thinking they 

 may be useful even as fragments, I am going to publish them 

 in their present state, only let the reader note that while my 

 other books endeavour, and claim, so far as they reach, to 

 give trustworthy knowledge of their subjects, this one only 

 shows how such knowledge may be obtained ; and it is little 



* It was in the year 1860, in June. 



f Admirably engraved by Mr. Burgess, from my pen drawing, now at 

 Oxford. By comparing it with the plate of the same flower in Sower- 

 by's work, the student will at once see the difference between attentive 

 drawing, which gives the cadence and relation of masses in a group, 

 and the mere copying of each flower in an uncousidered huddle. 



