78 PROSERPINA. 



farther, and instead of "a vegetable in a wrong place ," (which 

 it may happen to the innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, 

 without turning into a weed, therefore,) said, "A vegetable 

 which has an innate disposition to gel into the wrong place," 

 she would have greatly furthered the matter for us ; but then 

 she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably divid- 

 ing with vegetables her own little evangelical property of 

 original sin. 



5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence 

 of weed character in plants, as in men. If you glance 

 through your botanical books, you will see often added cer- 

 tain names ' a troublesome weed." It is not its being veno- 

 mous, or ugly, but its being impertinent thrusting itself 

 where it has no business, and hinders other people's business 

 that makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vege- 

 tables, the one that has destroyed for the present even 

 the possibility of European civilization, is only called a weed 

 in the slang of its votaries ; * but in the finest and truest 

 English we call so the plant which has come to us by chance 

 from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific 

 activity, the American water-plant, choking our streams till 

 the very fish that leap out of them cannot fall back, but die on 

 the clogged surface ; and indeed, for this unrestrainable, un- 

 conquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can be 

 enough dishonourable ? 



6. I pass to vegetation of nobler rank. 



You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave 

 my poppy, for the present, without an English specific name, 

 because I don't like Gerarde's ' corn-rose,' and can't yet think 

 of another. Nevertheless, I would have used Gerarde's name, 

 if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag is a 

 flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different re- 

 lations to the corn. The lily is grass m loveliness, as the corn 

 is grass in use ; and both grow together in peace gladiolus 

 in the wheat, and narcissus in the pasture. But the rose is of 



* And I have too harshly called our English Vines, ' wicked weeds of 

 Kent,' in Fore Clavigera, xxvii., vol. i., p. 377. Much may be said for 

 Ale, when we brew it for our people honestly 



