various states of form between bud and
flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant; and in
the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or
symbolisms, connected with its existence. The utter loss and far-scattered
ruin of the cistus and wild rose,--the dishonoured and dark contortion of
the convolvulus,--the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apennine, are
strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each
making of themselves a little cross as they die; and so enduring into the
days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know not
which is the more beautiful.

8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered
company, is the first and most subtle {70} condition of form in flowers;
and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined
grouping, but the wayward and accidental. Don't confuse the beautiful
consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness
of a foxglove,--though that also has its divinity; but of another kind.
That legal order of blossoming--for which we may wisely keep the accepted
name, 'inflorescence,'--is itself quite a separate subject of study, which
we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set
over the flower itself.

9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on
the palace of the Caesars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral,
flower. All silk and flame: a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen
among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's
altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower
absolute; inside and outside, _all_ flower. No sparing of colour
anywhere--no outside coarsenesses--no interior secrecies; open as the
sunshine that creates it; fine-finished on both sides, down to the
extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk; and robed in the purple
of the Caesars.

Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal
hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on
the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards from the spot where I
gathered the weed of its desolation.

10. A pure _cup_, you remember it is; that much at least {71} you cannot
but remember, of poppy-form among the cornfields; and it is best, in
beginning, to think of every flower as essentially a cup. There a