ell to;--in which last function I observe they are still
pleasing to the British public: and I found the children here, only the
other day, munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What pleasure
the flower can still give us, uncandied, and unbound, but in its own place
and life, I will try to trace through some of its constant laws.

11. And first, let us be clear that the native colour of the violet _is_
violet; and that the white and yellow kinds, though pretty in their place
and way, are not to be thought of in generally meditating the flower's
quality or power. A white violet is to black ones what a black man is to
white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I believe, properly pansies, and
belong also to wild districts for the most part; but the true violet, which
I have just now called 'black,' with Gerarde, "the blacke or purple violet,
hath a great prerogative above others," and all the nobler species of the
pansy itself are of full purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild
violet to blue. In the 'Laws of Fesole,' chap, vii., Sec.Sec. 20, 21, I have made
this dark pansy the representative of purple pure; the viola odorata, of
the link between that full purple and blue; and the heath-blossom of the
link between that full purple and red. The reader will do well, as much as
may be possible to him, to associate his study of botany, as indeed all
other studies of visible things, with that of painting: but he must
remember that he cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch
the flower in its _early_ growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it
is gathered--at least, when it is tied in bunches;--but I am under the
impression that the colour actually deadens also,--at all events, no other
single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground near it as a
violet will. The bright hounds-tongue looks merely like a spot of bright
paint; but a young violet glows like painted glass.

12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines of Milton and
Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both become clear to you. The said
lines are dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered
quotations by the hack botanists,--who probably never saw _them_, nor
anything else, _in_ Shakspeare or Milton in their lives,--till even in
reading them where they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their fresh
meaning: but none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita calls
the violet 'dim,' a