sorrels; nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of
sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcissus, why it should
be wrapped up in brown paper; and every time I see a violet, what it wants
with a spur?

3. What _any_ flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto
to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow
in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in
order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for
the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that a
violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if
she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite
gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by
her waist, as it were,--this is so much more like a girl of the period's
fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed
astonishment at it.

4. One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment!
a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has
chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild
haunts,--partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and
partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I
could see nowhere else. With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is
shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least
this bit of the truth--as follows.

5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or
dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight
except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to
nightingale--and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew
where violets grew in Illyria,--and grow everywhere else also, when they
can,--on a _bank_, facing the south.

Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are _meadow_ flowers, the
violet is a _bank_ flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope,
towards the sun. And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when
growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,--not at all,
in any strain of modesty, hiding _itself_, though it may easily be, by
grass or mossy stone, 'half hidden,'--but, to the full, showing itself, and
intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its
soft power.

No