146 PROSERPINA. 



ing the most simple facts at the base of this question ! Here 

 is this myrtille bush in my hand its cluster of some fifteen 

 or twenty delicate green branches knitting themselves down- 

 wards into the stubborn brown of a stem on which iny knife 

 makes little impression. I have not the slightest idea how 

 old it is, still less how old it might one day have been if I had 

 not gathered it ; and, less than the least, what hinders it from 

 becoming as old as it likes ! What doom is there over these 

 bright green sprays, that they may never win to any height or 

 space of verdure, nor persist beyond their narrow scope of 

 years ? 



11. And the more I think the more I bewilder myself ; for 

 these bushes, which are pruned and clipped by the deathless 

 Gardener into these lowly thickets of bloom, do not strew the 

 ground with fallen branches and faded clippings in any wise, 

 it is the pining umbrage of the patriarchal trees that tinges 

 the ground and betrays the foot beneath them : but, under 

 the heather and the Alpine rose. Well, what is under them, 

 then ? I never saw, nor thought of looking, will look pres- 

 ently under my own bosquets and beds of lingering heather- 

 blossom : beds indeed they were only a month since, a foot 

 deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the moun- 

 tain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of 

 metheglin. 



12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all, nor dwarfed 

 in the gardener's sense ; but pausing in perpetual youth and 

 strength, ordained out of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose- 

 trees the botanists have falsely called the proudest of them ; 

 yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to know the edge 

 of axe at their roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or searing 

 thunder-stroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for 

 them, and in them ; they themselves an Aurora, purple and 

 cloudless, stayed on all fhe happy hills. That shall be our 

 name for them, in the flushed Phoenician colour of their height, 

 in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea ; how much holier than 

 the depth of the Tyrian ! And the queen of them on our OWD 

 Alps shall be ' Aurora Alpium.' * 



* 'Aurora Regina,' changed from Rhododendron Ferrugineum. 





