xpansion (under fixed mechanical conditions) by light, heat, moisture,
etc. But vegetable tissue in the living branch did not contract nor
expand under external influence alone. The principle of life manifested
itself either by contention with, or felicitous recognition of, external
force. It accepted with a visible, active, and apparently joyful
concurrence, the influences which led the bough towards its due place in
the economy of the tree; and it obeyed reluctantly, partially, and with
distorted curvatures, those which forced it to violate the typical
organic form. The attention of painters of foliage had seldom been drawn
with sufficient accuracy to the lines either of branch curvature, or
leaf contour, as expressing these subtle laws of incipient volition; but
the relative merit of the great schools of figure design might, in
absence of all other evidence, be determined, almost without error, by
observing the precision of their treatment of leaf curvature. The
leaf-painting round the head of Ariosto by Titian, in the National
Gallery, might be instanced.

289. The leaf thus differed from the flower in forming and protecting
behind it, not only the bud in which was the form of a new shoot like
itself, but a piece of permanent work, and produced substance, by which
every following shoot could be placed under different circumstances from
its predecessor. Every leaf labored to solidify this substance during
its own life; but the seed left by the flower matured only as the flower
perished.

This difference in the action and endurance of the flower and leaf had
been applied by nearly all great nations as a type of the variously
active and productive states of life among individuals or commonwealths.
Chaucer's poem of the "Flower and Leaf" is the most definite expression
of the mediaeval feeling in this respect, while the fables of the rape of
Proserpine and of Apollo and Daphne embody that of the Greeks. There is
no Greek goddess corresponding to the Flora of the Romans. Their Flora
is Persephone, "the bringer of death." She plays for a little while in
the Sicilian fields, gathering flowers, then snatched away by Pluto,
receives her chief power as she vanishes from our sight, and is crowned
in the grave. Daphne, on the other hand, is the daughter of one of the
great Arcadian river gods, and of the earth; she is the type of the
river mist filling the rocky vales of Arcadia; the sun, pursuing this
mist from dell to dell,