ng states or governments there is a wiser
economy or an intelligence more provident of its end. I myself have the
conceit that if time, revoking my sentence of superannuation, should
restore my lost years and add youth to the wisdom learned along the
hedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so uncivilly
decay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around me.

Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, and
bring science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, classifications and
dissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts of
flowers by any Linnaean approach, but go rather by the old animistic way,
still honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods:

"When evening gray doth rise I fetch my round,
Over the mount and all this hallowed ground,
And early, ere the breath of odorous morn
Awakes the slumbering leaves."

So I greet the blossoms of hill and upland and water-meadow, knowing
them all by their country names, and sometimes fancying that they know
me back: all that is lacking is the tutelary power to guard their growth
and prolong their bright and fragrant lives. What fine old names they
have, great with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore;
archangel, tormentil, rosa solis or sun-dew, horehound, Saracen's
wound-wort, melilot or king's clover, pellitory of Spain! I cannot
coldly divide so fine a company into bare genera and species, but
imagine for them high genealogies and alliances by an imaginative method
of my own: to me the lily and the onion shall never be connections.

If I must read books on flowers, I take down such a one as Nicholas
Culpeper's _Complete Herbal_, written from "my house in Spitalfields
next the Red Lion, September 5th, 1653." For here is a man who attempers
science with the quaintest fancies after the manner of his generation,
and delightfully misinterprets the real affinity of the flowers and the
heavens. "He that would know the operation of the herbs must look up to
the stars astrologically," says this master; and so to him briony is "a
furious martial plant," and brank ursine "an excellent plant under the
dominion of the moon." Of rosemary he says, "the sun claims privilege in
it, and it is under the celestial ram," and of viper's bugloss, "it is
a most gallant herb of the sun." The bay-tree rouses him to real
eloquence, though not for Apollo's sake. "It is a tree of the sun and
unde