THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM. 85 



posed to Beauty in wildness ; it is their wildness which is their 

 virtue ; that the thyme is sweet where it is unthought of, 

 and the daisies red, where the foot despises them : while, in 

 other orders, wildness is their crime, " Wherefore, when I 

 looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild 

 grapes ? " But in all of them you must distinguish between 

 the pure wdldness of flowers and their distress. It may not 

 be our duty to tame them ; but it must be, to relieve. 



4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two 

 chapters, that I had examples given me of distressed and 

 happy wildness, in immediate contrast. The first, I grieve to 

 say, was in a bit of my own bruslnvood, left uncared-for evi- 

 dently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut my 

 way into it through a mass of thorny ruin ; black, birds-nest 

 like, entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill- 

 grown birches strangling each other, and changing half into 

 roots among the rock clefts ; knotted stumps of never-blos- 

 soming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of holly, all laced 

 and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost 

 unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, 

 laid over rotten ground through which the water soaked 

 ceaselessly, undermining it into merely unctuous clods and 

 clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It was all Nature's 

 free doing ! she had had her way with it to the uttermost ; 

 and clearly needed human help and interference in her busi- 

 ness ; and yet there was not one plant in the whole ruinous 

 and deathful riot of the place, whose nature was not in itself 

 wholesome and lovely ; but all lost for want of discipline. 



5. The other piece of wild growth was among the fallen 

 blocks of limestone under Malham Cove. Sheltered by the 

 ?liff above from stress of wind, the ash and hazel wood spring 

 'jhere in a fair and perfect freedom, without a diseased bough, 

 or an unwholesome shade. I do not know why mine is all 

 encumbered with overgrowth, and this so lovely that scarce a 

 branch ' could be gathered but with injury ; while under- 

 neath, the oxalis, and the two smallest geraniums (Lucidum 

 and Herb-Robert) and the mossy saxifrage, and the cross- 

 leaved bed-straw, and the white pansy, wrought themselves 



