seen most perfectly for setting off its colour, in group with
primrose,--and most luxuriantly, so far as I know, in hollows of the Savoy
limestones, associated with the pervenche, which embroiders and illumines
them all over. I believe it is the earliest of its race, sometimes called
'Martia,' March violet. In Greece and South Italy even a flower of the
winter.

"The Spring is come, the violet's _gone_,
The first-born child of the early sun.
With us, she is but a winter's flower;
The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower,
And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue
To the youngest sky of the selfsame hue.

And when the Spring comes, with her host
Of flowers, that flower beloved the most
Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse
Her heavenly odour, and virgin hues.

Pluck the others, but still remember
Their herald out of dim December,--
_The morning star_ of all the flowers,
The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours,
Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget
The virgin, virgin violet."[4]

3. It is the queen, not only of the violet tribe, but of all low-growing
flowers, in sweetness of scent--variously applicable and serviceable in
domestic economy:--the scent of the lily of the valley seems less capable
of preservation or use.

But, respecting these perpetual beneficences and benignities of the sacred,
as opposed to the malignant, herbs, whose poisonous power is for the most
part restrained in them, during their life, to their juices or dust, and
not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to
re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a
grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which
fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from
the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of
telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking it all the
while, how a violet throws off her perfume!--far less, whether it might not
be more wholesome to 'treat' the air which men are to breathe in masses, by
administration of vale-lilies and violets, instead of charcoal and sulphur!

The closing sentence of the first volume just now referred
to--p.254--should also be re-read; it was the sum of a chapter I had in
hand at that time on the Substances and Essences of Plants--which never got
finished;--and in trying to put it into small space, it has become obscure:
the terms "log