of these, the
corolla leads, and is the object of final purpose. The stamens and the
treasuries are only there in order to produce future corollas, though often
themselves decorative in the highest degree.

These, I repeat, are all the essential parts of a flower. But it would have
been difficult, with any other than the poppy, to have shown you them
alone; for nearly all other flowers keep with them, all their lives, their
nurse {79} or tutor leaves,--the group which, in stronger and humbler
temper, protected them in their first weakness, and formed them to the
first laws of their being. But the poppy casts these tutorial leaves away.
It is the finished picture of impatient and luxury-loving youth,--at first
too severely restrained, then casting all restraint away,--yet retaining to
the end of life unseemly and illiberal signs of its once compelled
submission to laws which were only pain,--not instruction.

19. Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its
side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there
complete in size and colour,--its stamens full-grown, but all packed so
closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of
shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from
torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the
aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can;
but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.]

20. Not so flowers of gracious breeding. Look at these four stages in the
young life of a primrose, Fig. 7. First confined, as strictly as the poppy
within five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it, the little
thing is content to remain a child, and finds its nursery large enough. The
green leaves unclose their points,--the little yellow ones peep out, like
ducklings. They find the light delicious, and open wide to it; and grow,
and grow, {80} and throw themselves wider at last into their perfect rose.
But they never leave their old nursery for all that; it and they live on
together; and the nursery seems a part of the flower.

21. Which is so, indeed, in all the loveliest flowers; and, in usual
botanical parlance, a flower is said to consist of its calyx, (or _hiding_
part--Calypso having rule over it,) and corolla, or garland part,
Proserpina having rule over it. But it is better to think of them always as
separate; for