5.  She has only one kind of flowers—­in her hand, as botanical classification stands at present; and whether the system be more rational, or in any human sense more scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwell together,—­and foxglove and euphrasy; and runs them on one side into the mints, and on the other into the nightshades;—­naming them, meanwhile, some from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest anyhow:—­or the method I am pleading for, which teaches us, watchful of their seasonable return and chosen abiding places, to associate in our memory the flowers which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time kept by the signs of Heaven, succeed, each other; and to name them in some historical connection with the loveliest fancies and most helpful faiths of the ancestral world—­Proserpina be judge; with every maid that sets flowers on brow or breast—­from Thule to Sicily.

6.  We will unbind our bouquet, then, and putting all the rest of its flowers aside, examine the range and nature of the little blue cluster only.

And first—­we have to note of it, that the plan of the blossom in all the kinds is the same; an irregular quatre-foil:  and irregular quatrefoils are of extreme rarity in flower form.  I don’t myself know one, except the Veronica.  The cruciform vegetables—­the heaths, the olives, the lilacs, the little Tormentillas, and the poppies, are all perfectly symmetrical.  Two of the petals, indeed, as a rule, are different from the other two, except in the heaths; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but always an equally balanced one:  while in the Veronica, as in the Violet, the blossom always refers itself to a supposed place on the stalk with respect to the ground; and the upper petal is always the largest.

The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed—­for clusters of the common veronicas, if luxuriant, throw their blossoms about anywhere.  But the idea of an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower’s little mind.

7.  In the second place, it is a quite open and flat quatrefoil—­so separating itself from the belled quadrature of the heath, and the tubed and primrose-like quadrature of the cruciferae; and, both as a quatrefoil, and as an open one, it is separated from the foxgloves and snapdragons, which are neither quatrefoils, nor open; but are cinqfoils shut up!

8.  In the third place, open and flat though the flower be, it is monopetalous; all the four arms of the cross strictly becoming one in the centre; so that, though the blue foils look no less sharply separate than those of a buttercup or a cistus; and are so delicate that one expects them to fall from their stalk if we breathe too near,—­do but lay hold of one,—­and, at the touch, the entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and may be laid, in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if it had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its stand by the milliner.