the sky itself, green lance-like stalks whose
rose and white umbels challenged the ardent day with their grace;
water-lilies slept on their leaves as in a trustful afternoon sleep.

To the plants of the water, the plants of the earth answered. I recall
an alley where students, a handkerchief about the neck, were as if
buried beneath the beauty of the leaves. It was the alley of the
_umbelliferae_. The fennel and the ferula raised their crowns upon
their stems with glistening sheaths. The perfumes spoke to each other
in the silence. And one felt that a silent understanding went from
plant to plant, and that over this isolated realm there hovered
something like resignation.

Since then I have understood the flowers and that their _families_
belonged together and have a natural affinity, and are not merely
divided into classes as an aid to our slow memories. Toward what
solution do these geometries in action, which are plants, progress?
I do not know. But there is a fascinating mystery in considering that
even as species correspond to certain geological periods and thus
group their sympathies, even so to-day they group themselves according
to the seasons. What correspondence is there between the character
of the shivering and snowy liliaceous plants of winter and the
purple solanaceous plants of autumn? And then there are still other
delightful dispositions which are due far less to the artifice of
man than to the consent of certain species to regard others as their
friends and not to pine away beside them. How sweet is the village
garden where the gleaming lily, like those gods who often visit the
humble, lives amid the cabbages, the blue leek, and the scallions,
which boil in the black pot of the poor! How I love the peasant
gardens at noonday when the mournful blue shadow of the vegetables
sleeps in the white squares of granular earth, when the cock calls
the silence, and when the buzzard, slanting and wheeling, makes
the scuttling hen cluck! There are the flowers of simple loves, the
flowers of the young wife who will dry the blue lavender to scent
her coarse sheets. And in this garden grows also the flower of the
rondel--the humble gilliflower with its simple perfume. There is also
the faithful box, each leaf of which is a small mirror of azure, and
the hollyhock in which the sweet and pure flame of melancholy
corollas burns; they are the flowers of religion vowed to silence and
austerity.

And I love also the flo