The Blue Flower Border 
279 
The blossoms of this little Iris seem to lie on the 
surface of the grass like a froth of blueness ; they 
gaze up at the sky with a sort of intimacy as if they 
were a part of it. Thoreau called it an cc air of easy 
sympathy/' The slightest clouding or grayness of 
atmosphere makes them turn away and close. 
The naming of Proserpina leads me to say this: 
that to grow in love and knowledge of flowers, and 
above all of blue flowers, you must read Ruskin's 
Proserpina. It is a book of botany, of studies of 
plants, but begemmed with beautiful sentences and 
thoughts and expressions, with lessons of pleasant- 
ness which you can never forget, of pictures which 
you never cease to see, such sentences and pictures 
as this : — 
u Rome. My father’s Birthday. I found the loveliest 
blue Asphodel I ever saw in my life in the fields beyond 
Monte Mario — -a spire two feet high, of more than two 
hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as 
the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering 
of the like, in the Elysian Fields, some day ! ” 
Oh, the power of written words ! when by these 
few lines I can carry forever in my inner vision this 
spire of starry blueness. To that writer, now in the 
Elysian Fields, an honest teacher if ever one lived, 
I send my thanks for this beautiful vision of blue- 
ness. 
