[Footnote 29:  These translations are included in “Miscellanea,” vol. xvii.]

The last contribution, in 1876, which remains to be mentioned is “Dandelion Clocks,” a short tale; but it will need rather a long introduction, as it opens out into a fresh trait of my sister’s character, namely, her love for flowers.

It need scarcely be said that she wrote as accurately about them as about everything else; and, in addition to this, she enveloped them in such an atmosphere of sentiment as served to give life and individuality to their inanimate forms.  The habit of weaving stories round them began in girlhood, when she was devoted to reading Mr. J.G.  Wood’s graceful translation of Alphonse Karr’s Voyage autour de mon Jardin.  The book was given to her in 1856 by her father, and it exercised a strong influence upon her mind.  What else made the ungraceful Buddlaea lovely in her eyes?  I confess that when she pointed out the shrub to me, for the first time, in Mr. Ellacombe’s garden, it looked so like the “Plum-pudding tree” in the “Willow pattern,” and fell so far short of my expectation of the plant over which the two florists had squabbled, that I almost wished that I had not seen it!  Still I did not share their discomfiture so fully as to think “it no longer good for anything but firewood!”

Karr’s fifty-eighth “Letter” nearly sufficed to enclose a declaration of love in every bunch of “yellow roses” which Julie tied together; and to plant an “Incognito” for discovery in every bed of tulips she looked at; whilst her favourite Letter XL., on the result produced by inhaling the odour of bean flowers, embodies the spirit of the ideal existence which she passed, as she walked through the fields of our work-a-day world: 

The beans were in full blossom.  But a truce to this cold-hearted pleasantry.  No, it is not a folly to be under the empire of the most beautiful—­the most noble feelings; it is no folly to feel oneself great, strong, invincible; it is not a folly to have a good, honest, and generous heart; it is no folly to be filled with good faith; it is not a folly to devote oneself for the good of others; it is not a folly to live thus out of real life.

No, no; that cold wisdom which pronounces so severe a judgment upon all it cannot do; that wisdom which owes its birth to the death of so many great, noble, and sweet things; that wisdom which only comes with infirmities, and which decorates them with such fine names—­which calls decay of the powers of the stomach and loss of appetite sobriety; the cooling of the heart and the stagnation of the blood a return to reason; envious impotence a disdain for futile things;—­this wisdom would be the greatest, the most melancholy of follies, if it were not the commencement of the death of the heart and the senses.

“Dandelion Clocks” resembles one of Karr’s “Letters” in containing the germs of a three volumed romance, but they are the germs only—­and the “proportions” of the picture are consequently well preserved.  Indeed, the tale always reminds me of a series of peaceful scenes by Cuyp, with low horizons, sleek cattle, and a glow in the sky betokening the approach of sunset.  First we have “Peter Paul and his two sisters playing in the pastures” at blowing dandelion clocks: