the other purple
varieties of the group are almost dark and sad coloured among the flowers
of summer; while, so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is
scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less grotesque, even to
ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or lappeted as to look at first like
some imperfect form of snapdragon for the most part spotted also, wrinkled
as if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, and springing
out of calices which, in their clustering spines, embody the general
roughness of the plant.

5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should think me unkind or
intemperate in my description, a flower very dear and precious to me; and
at this time my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign of all
the sweet reginas of the spring is over--the reign of the silvia and
anemone, of viola and veronica; and at last, and this year abdicated under
tyrannous storm,[31] the reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are
nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up
the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black
knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the
grass,--the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.

6. _P_runell, _or_ Brunell--Gerarde calls it; and Brunella, rightly and
authoritatively, Tournefort; Prunella, carelessly, Linnaeus, and idly
following him, the moderns, casting out all the meaning and help of its
name--of which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, in
English--meaning that who has this plant needs no physician.

7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it would reprove me for
what I have just said of the poverty of colour in its tribe; for the most
glowing of violets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of its
hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and oppressed by the dark
calices out of which they spring, and their utmost power in the field is
only of a saddened amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And what
is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the
scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the
way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain,
and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of
the cluster broken short away altogether.

8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to
be seen by human creatu