196 PROSERPINA. 



trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are 

 often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is 

 five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been 

 held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he 

 missed its throat ; the blue petals being really campanulate, 

 and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and 

 crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away 

 now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet 

 the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly 

 on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the 

 point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre 

 over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular 

 shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the wild- 

 flung Medusa-like embroidery of the white Lucia.* 



4. The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said ; like that of 

 sugary preserved citron ; the root leaves are of green just as 

 soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed ; 

 the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one's 

 fingers shrivel if kept too long in water. And the whole plant 

 looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and 

 obliged to live there not for its own sins, but for some 

 Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden, in a partly bog- 

 gish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate ; and 

 with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that 

 it quarrels with, and bites the corolla ; something of glutton- 

 ous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable 

 sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life 

 would be truer of it than a piggish, the nest of it being in- 

 deed on the rock, or morassy rock-investiture, like a sea- 



ird's on her rock ledge. 



5. I have hunted through seven treatises on botany, namely 

 Loudon's Encyclopaedia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of 

 Oxford, Lindley (' Ladies' Botany '), and Figuier, without 

 being able to find the meaning of 'Lentibulariacese,' to which 



* Our ' Lucia Nivea,' ' Blanche Lucy ; ' in present botany, Bog bean t 

 having no connection whatever with any manner of beau, but only a 

 slight resemblance to bean-leaves in its own lower ones. Compare Ch. 

 IV. 11. 



