Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers by John Ruskin
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page 2 of 120 (01%)
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such special study by recurring to general principles, or points of wider
interest. But the scope of such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the use of it best felt, by entering now on specific study. I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of the group to which it belongs--Cytherides--is more arbitrary than that of the rest, and calls for some immediate explanation. 2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write something very pretty for them about violets: but my time for writing prettily is long past; and it requires some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even from writing querulously. For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world, I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault--always of course submissively, but very articulately--with whatever Nature seems to me not to have managed to the best of her power;--as, for extreme instance, her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of the wood sorrels; nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcissus, why it should be wrapped up in brown paper; and every time I see a violet, what it wants with a spur? 3. What _any_ flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that a violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite |
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