jungle; but, in one way or another, for good and evil constantly, by day and night, the various powers of life and death in the plants of the desert are poured into the air, as vials of continual angels:  and that no words, no thoughts can measure, nor imagination follow, the possible change for good which energetic and tender care of the wild herbs of the field and trees of the wood might bring, in time, to the bodily pleasure and mental power of Man.

32.  II.  VIOLA PSYCHE.  Ophelia’s Pansy.

The wild heart’s-ease of Europe; its proper colour an exquisitely clear purple in the upper petals, gradated into deep blue in the lower ones; the centre, gold.  Not larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly set in all its petals.  Able to live in the driest ground; beautiful in the coast sand-hills of Cumberland, following the wild geranium and burnet rose:  and distinguished thus by its power of life, in waste and dry places, from the violet, which needs kindly earth and shelter.

Quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour by comparison.

It is badly drawn even in the ‘Flora Danica,’ No. 623, considered there apparently as a species escaped from gardens; the description of it being as follows:—­

“Viola tricolor hortensis repens, flore purpureo et coeruleo, C.B.P., 199.”  (I don’t know what C.B.P. means.) “Passim, juxta villas.”

“Viola tricolor, caule triquetro diffuso, foliis oblongis incisis, stipulis pinnatifidis,” Linn.  Systema Naturae, 185.

33.  “Near the country farms”—­does the Danish botanist mean?—­the more luxuriant weedy character probably acquired by it only in such neighbourhood; and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration possible to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its wild home.  It is given by Sibthorpe from the Trojan Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf; the flower described as “triste et pallide violaceus,” but coloured in his plate full purple; and as he does not say whether he went up Olympus to gather it himself, or only saw it brought down by the assistant whose lovely drawings are yet at Oxford, I take leave to doubt his epithets.  That this should be the only Violet described in a ‘Flora Graeca’ extending to ten folio volumes, is a fact in modern scientific history which I must leave the Professor of Botany and the Dean of Christ Church to explain.

34.  The English varieties seem often to be yellow in the lower petals, (see Sowerby’s plate, 1287 of the old edition), crossed, I imagine, with Viola Aurea, (but see under Viola Rupestris, No. 12); the names, also, varying between tricolor and bicolor—­with no note anywhere of the three colours, or two colours, intended!