19.  And this the more, because the recognized virtues and uses of the plant are real and manifold; and the ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth of life connected with it by the German popular name ‘Honour-prize’; while to the heart of the British race, the same thought is brought home by Shakespeare’s adoption of the flower’s Welsh name, for the faithfullest common soldier of his ideal king.  As a lover’s pledge, therefore, it does not merely mean memory;—­for, indeed, why should love be thought of as such at all, if it need to promise not to forget?—­but the blossom is significant also of the lover’s best virtues, patience in suffering, purity in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in truth:  and therefore I make it, worthily, the clasping and central flower of the Cytherides.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

GIULIETTA.

1.  Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one’s fancy,—­and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of them?—­if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted life to be found in their native places when we travelled.  So long as I had crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther horticulture,—­and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.

2.  Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling.  The other day,—­whether indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I cannot judge;—­but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing, Daily news in hand, with a young officer—­her fortunate vis-a-vis—­on the subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]