t we do to garnish our winter
gluttonies with dying and useless ones.

19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the
hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster--nor the chance of watching
one in seed:--The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of
April, and leaves no sign of itself--that _I_ ever found. The botanists
tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic
for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used
to make and handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes fall
seeds--too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in
the same spot. I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy
enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.

20. Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion
are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of--Providence, shall
we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence?
May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first
volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time
of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly,
under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they
are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph
of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as
_judge;_ watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and
prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of
the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly
multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their
skill, and inexorable upon their labour.

21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care
in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many
executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and
later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of
the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a
consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon
jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in
a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]

22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many
illustrations