THE PARABLE OF JOASH. 79 



another and higher order than the corn, and you never saw a 

 cornfield overrun with sweetbrier or apple-blossom. 



They have no inind, they, to get into the wrong place. 



What is it, then, this temper in some plants malicious as it 

 seems intrusive, at all events, or erring, which brings them 

 out of their places thrusts them where they thwart us and 

 offend ? 



7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. 

 A plant that can live anywhere, will often live where it is not 

 wanted. But the delicate and tender ones keep at home. You 

 have no trouble in * keeping down ' the spring gentian. It 

 rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as like 

 heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it 

 to give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the 

 loneliest moors, above the high force of Tees ; its Latin name, 

 for us (I may as well tell you at once) is to be ' Lucia verna ;' 

 and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale. 



8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able 

 to live anywhere, and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as 

 I know, is the first of large-leaved plants to grow afresh on 

 ground that has been disturbed : fall of Alpine debris, ruin of 

 railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by flood, it seeks 

 to heal and redeem ; but it does not offend us in our gardens, 

 nor impoverish us in our fields. 



Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate 

 hardihood, is at least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. 

 That it should have no choice of home, no love of native land, 

 is ungentle ; much more if such discrimination as it has, be 

 immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open and much-tra- 

 versed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers. 



The tormentilla gleams in showers along the mountain 

 turf ; her delicate crosslets are separate, though constellate, as 

 the rubied daisy. But the king-cup (blessing be upon it 

 always no less) crowds itself sometimes into too burnished 

 flame of inevitable gold. I don't know if there was anything 

 in the darkness of this last spring to make it brighter in resist- 

 ance ; but I never saw any spaces of full warm yellow, in 

 natural colour, so intense as the meadows between Eeading 



