nd is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as
much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a
spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common
botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite
another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another
temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with
butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and
generally unluminous--flowers I can scarcely call them--and weeds I will
not,--creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general
name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she
returns to the day from the dead.

But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye--again you see I
refuse for them the word weed;--and the waste-loving Chicory, which the
Venetians call "Sponsa solis," are all to be held in one class with the
{119} Sunflowers; but dedicate,--the daisy to Alcestis alone; others to
Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself: but I can't follow their mythology
yet awhile.

3. Now in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in
_wildness_; it is their wildness which is their virtue;--that the thyme is
sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot
despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their
crime,--"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of them you must distinguish
between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our
duty to tame them; but it must be, to relieve.

4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I
had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate
contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood,
left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut
my way into it through a mass of thorny ruin; black, birds-nest like,
entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches
strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts;
knotted stumps of never-blossoming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of
holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost
unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten
ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into