ix. THE VERONICA. 



hereafter, and we behold them as they shall look when 

 this mortal shall have put on immortality ; so the 

 blossom is so radiant and graceful, full of all sweetness 

 and light wears the angel face because in it the life 

 of the individual is sacrificed for the life of the race. 

 Hegel in his " Philosophy of History " has taken notice 

 of the peculiar, almost unearthly beauty, unlike the 

 complexion of mere health and vital vigour, seen in the 

 faces of women when their sorrow has passed into the 

 joy that a man is born into the world a refined and 

 most delicate and transparent beauty, breathed as it 

 were from the soul within. Such an exquisite bloom of 

 beauty does the plant assume in the flower-face, as the 

 seed is born of it which is to perpetuate the species and 

 to grow and blossom in its turn into self-sacrificing 

 loveliness. What would our springs and summers be 

 without their flower-faces ? And yet for ages untold a 

 flowerless earth turned its sombre face up to the sun. 

 It had not learned to smile or laugh or blush in those 

 dim far-off fern-ages before the flowers came to light up 

 the gloom. 



Every flower-face, properly speaking, may be called a 

 veronica. It is a likeness of Him who is not only the true 

 vine, but also the true daisy, the true rose, the true lily. 

 He is the ideal of which each flower is the partial and 

 transient representation ; the Substance that casts this 

 dim shadow of itself in the fields; the Light that is 

 refracted into this beautiful radiance by the materials of 

 earth. For, just as the instances which He gives of 

 the resemblance between the kingdom of heaven and 



