And on Thursday, the eighth or ninth day from Paris, days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud.

8.  Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with sore shortcomings.  It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of education for youth;—­and my certainty that a true knowledge of their native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort, whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges, west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do anything serious,—­then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don’t find a single note of its preferences or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.

9.  But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of.  In laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself.  But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the scythe.  And only on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show herself,—­and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be mown the least trim during her time of disport there.  So spared and indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.