3.  What any flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also.  But that a violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by her waist, as it were,—­this is so much more like a girl of the period’s fancy than a violet’s, that I never gather one separately but with renewed astonishment at it.

4.  One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment! a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild haunts,—­partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I could see nowhere else.  With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least this bit of the truth—­as follows.

5.  The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or dales).  But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to nightingale—­and, after all, was London bred.  But Viola’s beloved knew where violets grew in Illyria,—­and grow everywhere else also, when they can,—­on a bank, facing the south.

Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are meadow flowers, the violet is a bank flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope, towards the sun.  And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,—­not at all, in any strain of modesty, hiding itself, though it may easily be, by grass or mossy stone, ’half hidden,’—­but, to the full, showing itself, and intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its soft power.

Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in the reversion of its two upper petals, the flower shows this purpose of being fully seen. (For a flower that does hide itself, take a lily of the valley, or the bell of a grape hyacinth, or a cyclamen.) But respecting this matter of petal-reversion, we must now farther state two or three general principles.

6.  A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or campanula, is always composed of an unbroken whorl, or corolla, in the form of a disk, cup, bell, or, if it draw together again at the lips, a narrow-necked vase.  This cup, bell, or vase, is divided into similar petals, (or segments, which are petals carefully joined,) varying in number from three to eight, and enclosed by a calyx whose sepals are symmetrical also.