18.  Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to nursing mothers was ‘more than ordinarily false’; thinking that its rarity could never have allowed it to be fairly tried.  If indeed true, or in any degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones.

19.  I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster—­nor the chance of watching one in seed:—­The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of April, and leaves no sign of itself—­that I ever found.  The botanists tell me that its fruit “dehisces loculicidally,” which I suppose is botanic for “splits like boxes,” (but boxes shouldn’t split, and didn’t, as we used to make and handle them before railways).  Out of the split boxes fall seeds—­too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in the same spot.  I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.

20.  Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of—­Providence, shall we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence?  May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly, under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as judge; watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men:  comparing with it carefully the close of the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their skill, and inexorable upon their labour.

21.  The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care in the frontispiece to this number of ‘Proserpina,’ was one of many executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]