50 PROSERPINA. 



4. First, the order : the proportion, and answering to each 

 other, of the parts ; for the study of which it becomes neces- 

 sary to know what its parts are ; and that a flower consists 

 essentially of Well, I really don't know what it consists es- 

 sentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks, and 

 toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and 

 pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, oi 

 110 use at all, seemingly ; and others have no bracts, and no 

 stalks, and no toruses, and no calices, and no corollas, and 

 nothing recognizable for stamens or pistils, only, when they 

 come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one doesn't call 

 them flowers ; they get together in knots, and one calls them 

 catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether ; I 

 haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blos- 

 som is like ; only I know its bracts get together and make a 

 cup of themselves afterwards, which the Italians call, as they 

 do the dome of St. Peter's, ' cupola ' ; and that is a great pity, 

 for their own sake as well as the world's, that they were not 

 content with their ilex cupolas, which were made to hold 

 something, but took to building these big ones upside-down, 

 which hold nothing less than nothing, large extinguishers 

 of the flame of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrass- 

 ment, a flower not only is without essential consistence of a 

 given number of parts, but it rarely consists, alone, of itself. 

 One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower ; but a hyacinth is any 

 number of flowers. One does not talk of ' a heather ' ; when 

 one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom, 

 because heath-bells, though they grow together for com- 

 pany's sake, do so in a voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed 

 in their places ; and yet, they depend on each other for effect, 

 as much as a bunch of grapes. 



5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, 

 is that most subtle part of their order, and the most difficult 

 to represent. Take the cluster of bog-heather bells, for in- 

 stance, Line-study 1. You might think at first there were no 

 lines in it worth study ; but look at it more carefully. There 

 are twelve bells in the cluster. There may be fewer, or more ; 

 but the bog-heath is apt to run into something near that 



