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under the heather and the Alpine rose.--Well, what _is_ under them, then? I never saw, nor thought of looking,--will look presently under my own bosquets and beds of lingering heather-blossom: beds indeed they were only a month since, a foot deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the mountain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of metheglin. 12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,--nor dwarfed in the gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees--the botanists have falsely called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to know the edge of axe at their {212} roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and _in_ them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phoenician colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'[61] 13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less than botany. 'With hair _implicit_.' The interweaving of complex band, which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to _separate_ itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the utmost space of air. In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the _reason_ of serenity: {213} the root and branch intricacy of closest knowledge and fellowship. 14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally well-trained scientific man since Linnaeus--Humboldt--which, containing much that is at this moment of
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