g; the second, red or purple, like beads of coral or
amethyst. Their minute flowers have rarely any general part or power in the
colors of mountain ground; but, examined closely, they are one of the chief
joys of the traveller's rest among the Alps; and full of exquisiteness
unspeakable, in their several bearings and miens of blossom, so to speak.
Plate VIII. represents, however feebly, the proud bending back of her head
by Myrtilla Regina:[60] an action as beautiful in _her_ as it is terrible
in the Kingly Serpent of Egypt.

3. The formal differences between these three families are trenchant and
easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of
the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but
only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae
are symmetrical in their blossom, and the Aurorae unsymmetrical. Farther,
the Myrtillae are not absolutely determinate in the number of their foils,
(this being essentially a characteristic of flowers exposed to much
hardship,) and are thus sometimes quatrefoil, in sympathy with the Ericae.
But the Aurorae are strictly cinqfoil. These last are the only European form
of a larger group, well named 'Azalea' from the Greek [Greek: aza],
dryness, and its adjective [Greek: azalea], dry or parched; and _this_ name
must be kept for the world-wide group, (including under it Rhododendron,
but not Kalmia,) because there is an under-meaning in the word Aza,
enabling it to be applied to the substance of dry earth, and indicating one
of the great functions of the Oreiades, in common with the mosses,--the
collection of earth upon rocks.

4. Neither the Ericae, as I have just said, nor Aurorae bear useful fruit;
and the Ericae are named from their consequent worthlessness in the eyes of
the Greek farmer; they were the plants he 'tore up' for his bed, or
signal-fire, his word for them including a farther sense of crushing or
bruising into a heap. The Westmoreland shepherds now, alas! burn them
remorselessly on the ground, (and a year since had nearly set the copse of
Brantwood on fire just above the house.) The sense of {208} parched and
fruitless existence is given to the heaths, with beautiful application of
the context, in our English translation of Jeremiah xvii. 6; but I find the
plant there named is, in the Septuagint, Wild Tamarisk; the mountains of
Palestine being, I suppose, in that latitude, too low for heath,