Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers by John Ruskin
page 80 of 120 (66%)
page 80 of 120 (66%)
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intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and
at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the grass,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle. 6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnæus, and idly following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician. 7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of the cluster broken short away altogether. 8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. |
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