224 PROSERPINA. 



such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as 

 a study ; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent 

 to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection 

 with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings. 

 It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old 

 scientific botany, and the aborninableness of new, as an ele- 

 ment of education for youth ; and my certainty that a true 

 knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be 

 one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl 

 in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me to gather into 

 system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts. And 

 of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want 

 chiefly the details of the Flora, I find none ; and in this in- 

 stance of the milkwort, whose name I was first told by the 

 Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then walking with me on 

 the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges, west of 

 Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint 

 that, being then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to 

 draw the great plain and distant spire, it was of no use trying in 

 the poor remainder of life to do anything serious, then, and 

 there, I say, for the first time examining the strange little 

 flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone 

 crags of Alsace and Burgundy,* I don't find a single note of 

 its preferences or antipathies in other districts, and cannot 

 say a word about the soil it chooses, or the height it ventures, 

 or the familiarities to which it condescends, on the Alps or 

 Apennines. 



9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brant- 

 wood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond any other 

 little blossom I know of. In laying out the rock garden, most 

 of the terrace sides were trusted to remnants of the natural 

 slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which nearly 

 every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad some- 

 times to root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was 

 brought to mathematically true level of surface, and slope of 



* I deliberately, not garrulously, allow more autobiography in ' Pro- 

 serpina ' than is becoming, because I know not how far I may be per- 

 mitted to carry 011 that which was begun in. ' Fors.' 



