22.  But also, in beginning ‘Proserpina,’ I intended to give many illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the original drawings at Oxford for the ‘Flora Graeca,’ or the nobly engraved plates executed in the close of the last century for the ‘Flora Danica’ and ‘Flora Londinensis.’  The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of the larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two; and had I seen the miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study which are collected in the first and second volumes, published in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work would never have been undertaken.[29] Such as it is, however, I may still, health being granted me, persevere in it; for my own leaf and branch studies express conditions of shade which even these most exquisite botanical plates ignore; and exemplify uses of the pen and pencil which cannot be learned from the inimitable fineness of line engraving.  The frontispiece to this number, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest field-thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on smooth grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with white on the nearer thorns, may well surpass the effect of the plate.

23.  In the following number of ‘Proserpina’ I have been tempted to follow, with more minute notice than usual, the ‘conditions of adversity’ which, as they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the Dragonweed and Nettle:  but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of separating the treatment of subjects in ‘Proserpina’ from the microscopic curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor shall this work close, if my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long ago in ‘Modern Painters,’ to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England and Italy.

* * * * *

CHAPTER V.

BRUNELLA.

1.  It ought to have been added to the statements of general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this volume, Sec. 6, that if the petals, while brought into relations of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form,—­and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, remain clearly leaves, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and assume no grotesque or obscure outline,—­the flower, though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or misled.  But if any of the petals lose their definite character as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, or strained into any other form or function than that of petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by some kind of constant evil influence; and, so far as we conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the protection or affliction of the inferior orders of creatures, it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pollution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.[30]