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 abominableness of new, as an element 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.[25] 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 instance 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 Brantwood, 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 sometimes to
root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to
mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with
delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the