The Project Gutenberg EBook of Proserpina, Volume 2, by John Ruskin

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Title: Proserpina, Volume 2
Studies Of Wayside Flowers

Author: John Ruskin

Release Date: February 17, 2005 [EBook #15088]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PROSERPINA.

STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS,

WHILE THE AIR WAS YET PURE

_AMONG THE ALPS, AND IN THE SCOTLAND AND
ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW_.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS
CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.

VOL. II.

1888.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

VIOLA.

1. Although I have not been able in the preceding volume to complete, in
any wise as I desired, the account of the several parts and actions of
plants in general, I will not delay any longer our entrance on the
examination of particular kinds, though here and there I must interrupt
such special study by recurring to general principles, or points of wider
interest. But the scope of such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the
use of it best felt, by entering now on specific study.

I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of the group to which it
belongs--Cytherides--is more arbitrary than that of the rest, and calls for
some immediate explanation.

2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write something very pretty for
them about violets: but my time for writing prettily is long past; and it
requires some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even from writing
querulously. For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more
and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world,
I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that
interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault--always of
course submissively, but very articulately--with whatever Nature seems to
me not to have managed to the best of her power;--as, for extreme instance,
her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of
the wood