under the
heather and the Alpine rose.--Well, what _is_ under them, then? I never
saw, nor thought of looking,--will look presently under my own bosquets and
beds of lingering heather-blossom: beds indeed they were only a month
since, a foot deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the
mountain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of
metheglin.

12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,--nor dwarfed in the
gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out
of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees--the botanists have falsely
called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to
know the edge of axe at their {212} roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or
searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and
_in_ them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all
the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phoenician
colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much
holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps
shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'[61]

13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean
on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less
than botany. 'With hair _implicit_.' The interweaving of complex band,
which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts
and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure
of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the
instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether
against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship
to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to _separate_
itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the
utmost space of air.

In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has
come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the
_reason_ of serenity: {213} the root and branch intricacy of closest
knowledge and fellowship.

14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any
botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them
two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally
well-trained scientific man since Linnaeus--Humboldt--which, containing much
that is at this moment of