n's Cyclopaedia, the
only general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in camellia
houses, that its flowers develope at Christmas, and that they are
beautifully varied like a fritillary: whereupon I am very anxious to see
them, and taste their fruit, and be able to {217} tell my pupils something
intelligible of them,--a new order, as it seems to me, among my Oreiades.
But for the present I can make no room for them, and must be content, for
England and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including all the
fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds; and Azalea for the
fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes; taking the special name 'Aurora'
for the red and purple ones of Europe, and resigning the already accepted
'Rhodora' to those of the Andes and Himalaya.

17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I hope
nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own Oreiades; but
shall set myself on the most familiar of them first, as I partly hinted in
taking for the frontispiece of this volume two unchecked shoots of our
commonest heath, in their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must
go out and see and think--and for the first time in my life--what becomes
of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own mountain Cora hides herself
in winter; and where her sweet body is laid in its death.

Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That harvest of amethyst
bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cumberland hill and moorland; what
substance is there in it, yearly gathered out of the mountain
winds,--stayed there, as if the morning and evening clouds had been caught
out of them and woven into flowers; 'Ropes of sea-sand'--but that is
child's magic {218} merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath out of the
cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever worn by the Earth? What
weight of that transparent tissue, half crystal and half comb of honey,
lies strewn every year dead under the snow?

I must go and look, and can write no more to-day; nor to-morrow neither. I
must gather slowly what I see, and remember; and meantime leaving, to be
dealt with afterwards, the difficult and quite separate question of the
production of _wood_, I will close this first volume of Proserpina with
some necessary statements respecting the operations, serviceable to other
creatures than themselves, in which the lives of the noblest plants are
ended: honourable in this service equall