gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by
her waist, as it were,--this is so much more like a girl of the period's
fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed
astonishment at it.

4. One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment!
a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has
chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild
haunts,--partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and
partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I
could see nowhere else. With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is
shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least
this bit of the truth--as follows.

5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or
dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight
except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to
nightingale--and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew
where violets grew in Illyria,--and grow everywhere else also, when they
can,--on a _bank_, facing the south.

Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are _meadow_ flowers, the
violet is a _bank_ flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope,
towards the sun. And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when
growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,--not at all,
in any strain of modesty, hiding _itself_, though it may easily be, by
grass or mossy stone, 'half hidden,'--but, to the full, showing itself, and
intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its
soft power.