150 PROSERPINA. 



general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in 

 camellia houses, that its flowers develop at Christmas, and 

 that they are beautifully varied like a fritillary : whereupon I 

 am very anxious to see them, and taste their fruit, and be able 

 to tell my pupils something intelligible of them, a new order, 

 as it seems to me, among my Oreiades. But for the present 

 I can make no room for them, and must be content, for Eng- 

 land and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including 

 all the fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds ; 

 and Azalea for the fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes ; tak- 

 ing the special name ' Aurora ' for the red and purple ones 

 of Europe, and resigning the already accepted ' Rhodora ' to 

 those of the Andes and Himalaya. 



17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I 

 hope nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own 

 Oreiades ; but shall set myself on the most familiar of them 

 first, as I partly hinted in taking for the frontispiece of this 

 volume two unchecked shoots of our commonest heath, in 

 their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must go out 

 and see and think and for the first time in my life what 

 becomes of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own 

 mountain Cora hides herself in winter ; and where her sweet 

 body is laid in its death. 



Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That har- 

 vest of amethyst bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cum- 

 berland hill and moorland ; what substance is there in it, 

 yearly gathered out of the mountain winds, stayed there, as 

 if the morning and evening clouds had been caught out of 

 them and woven into flowers ; ' Ropes of sea-sand ' but that 

 is child's magic merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath 

 out of the cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever 

 worn by the Earth ? What weight of that transparent tissue, 

 half crystal and half comb of honey, lies strewn every year 

 dead under the snow ? 



I must go and look, and can write no more to-day ; nor to- 

 morrow neither. I must gather slowly what I see, and 

 remember ; and meantime leaving, to be dealt with afterwards, 

 the difficult and quite separate question of the production of 



