Volume II Part 4 (1/2)

”And all those sayings will I over-swear, And all those swearings keep as true in soul As doth that orbed continent the Fire That severs day from night.”

Or, at least, did once sever day from night,--and perhaps does still in Illyria. Old England must seek new images for her loves from gas and electric sparks,--not to say furnace fire.

I am obliged, by press of other work, to set down these notes in cruel shortness: and many a reader may be disposed to question utterly the standard by which the measurement is made. It will not be found, on reference to my other books, that they encourage young ladies to go into convents; or undervalue the dignity of wives and mothers. But, as surely as the sun _does_ sever day from night, it will be found always that the n.o.blest and loveliest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature; and their pa.s.sions are trained to obey them; like their dogs. Homer, indeed, loves Helen with all his heart, and restores her, after all her naughtiness, to the queens.h.i.+p of her household; but he never thinks of her as Penelope's equal, or Iphigenia's. Practically, in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the husbands have some trouble in managing St. Cecilia or St. Elizabeth; of which questions I shall be obliged to speak more seriously in another place: content, at present, if English maids know better, by Proserpina's help, what Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, violet.

CHAPTER II.

PINGUICULA.

(Written in early June, 1881.)

1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it till next year.

There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2.

Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or 'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (_old_ Sowerby's) pretty drawing.

The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.

2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only, growing from the _ground_ and you may pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers, characteristically,--three and four very often,--spring from the same root, in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that cl.u.s.ters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.

3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular cl.u.s.ters of approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,--they may be six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the _plant_ is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the _flower_ has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,--spurred, and _five-petaled_,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted--the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular shower of fine Venetian gla.s.s broken, partly like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]

4. The calyx is of a dark _soppy_ green, I said; like that of sugary preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.

And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there--not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden,--in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;--something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, the _nest_ of it being indeed on the rock, or mora.s.sy rock-invest.i.ture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's Encyclopaedia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies'

Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of 'Lentibulariaceae,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all (except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13] but these above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long, worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into cla.s.sing together two orders naturally quite distinct, the b.u.t.terworts and the Bladderworts.

Whatever the name may mean--it is bad Latin. There is such a word as Lenticularis--there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us no longer.[14]

The b.u.t.terworts are a perfectly distinct group--whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculae,)--their English, Bog-Violet, or, more familiarly, b.u.t.terwort; and their French, as at present, _Gra.s.sette_.

The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,

1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the n.o.blest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less characteristic than that of the following species.

2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured b.u.t.terwort, (instead of 'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.

3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine b.u.t.terwort, white and much smaller than either of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453.

Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern Europe. ”In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-s.h.i.+re, where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it.”

(Grindon.)

4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale b.u.t.terwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol.

iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group.

The leaves, ”like those of other species, but rather more delicate and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end.”

(Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford, Dorsets.h.i.+re; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran, and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found.