Chapter 12. Cora And Kronos

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_ CHAPTER XII. CORA AND KRONOS

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1. Of all the lovely wild plants--and few, mountain-bred, in Britain, are other than lovely,--that fill the clefts and crest the ridges of my Brantwood rock, the dearest to me, by far, are the clusters of whortleberry which divide possession of the lower slopes with the wood hyacinth and pervenche. They are personally and specially dear to me for their association in my mind with the woods of Montanvert; but the plant itself, irrespective of all accidental feeling, is indeed so beautiful in all its ways--so delicately strong in the spring of its leafage, so modestly wonderful in the formation of its fruit, and so pure in choice of its haunts, not capriciously or unfamiliarly, but growing in luxuriance through all the healthiest and sweetest seclusion of mountain territory throughout Europe,--that I think I may without any sharp remonstrance be permitted to express for this once only, personal feeling in my nomenclature, calling it in Latin 'Myrtilla Cara,' and in French 'Myrtille Cherie,' but retaining for it in English its simply classic name, 'Blue Whortle.' {206}

2. It is the most common representative of the group of Myrtillae, which, on reference to our classification, will be found central between the Ericae and Aurorae. The distinctions between these three families may be easily remembered, and had better be learned before going farther; but first let us note their fellowship. They are all Oreiades, mountain plants; in specialty, they are all strong in stem, low in stature, and the Ericae and Aurorae glorious in the flush of their infinitely exulting flowers, ("the rapture of the heath"--above spoken of, p. 96.) But all the essential loveliness of the Myrtillae is in their leaves and fruit: the first always exquisitely finished and grouped like the most precious decorative work of sacred painting; the second, red or purple, like beads of coral or amethyst. Their minute flowers have rarely any general part or power in the colors of mountain ground; but, examined closely, they are one of the chief joys of the traveller's rest among the Alps; and full of exquisiteness unspeakable, in their several bearings and miens of blossom, so to speak. Plate VIII. represents, however feebly, the proud bending back of her head by Myrtilla Regina:[60] an action as beautiful in _her_ as it is terrible in the Kingly Serpent of Egypt.

3. The formal differences between these three families are trenchant and easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae are symmetrical in their blossom, and the Aurorae unsymmetrical. Farther, the Myrtillae are not absolutely determinate in the number of their foils, (this being essentially a characteristic of flowers exposed to much hardship,) and are thus sometimes quatrefoil, in sympathy with the Ericae. But the Aurorae are strictly cinqfoil. These last are the only European form of a larger group, well named 'Azalea' from the Greek [Greek: aza], dryness, and its adjective [Greek: azalea], dry or parched; and _this_ name must be kept for the world-wide group, (including under it Rhododendron, but not Kalmia,) because there is an under-meaning in the word Aza, enabling it to be applied to the substance of dry earth, and indicating one of the great functions of the Oreiades, in common with the mosses,--the collection of earth upon rocks.

4. Neither the Ericae, as I have just said, nor Aurorae bear useful fruit; and the Ericae are named from their consequent worthlessness in the eyes of the Greek farmer; they were the plants he 'tore up' for his bed, or signal-fire, his word for them including a farther sense of crushing or bruising into a heap. The Westmoreland shepherds now, alas! burn them remorselessly on the ground, (and a year since had nearly set the copse of Brantwood on fire just above the house.) The sense of {208} parched and fruitless existence is given to the heaths, with beautiful application of the context, in our English translation of Jeremiah xvii. 6; but I find the plant there named is, in the Septuagint, Wild Tamarisk; the mountains of Palestine being, I suppose, in that latitude, too low for heath, unless in the Lebanon.

5. But I have drawn the reader's thoughts to this great race of the Oreiades at present, because they place for us in the clearest light a question which I have finally to answer before closing the first volume of Proserpina; namely, what is the real difference between the three ranks of Vegetative Humility, and Noblesse--the Herb, the Shrub, and the Tree?

6. Between the herb, which perishes annually, and the plants which construct year after year an increasing stem, there is, of course, no difficulty of discernment; but between the plants which, like these Oreiades, construct for themselves richest intricacy of supporting stem, yet scarcely rise a fathom's height above the earth they gather and adorn,--between these, and the trees that lift cathedral aisles of colossal shade on Andes and Lebanon,--where is the limit of kind to be truly set?

7. We have the three orders given, as no botanist could, in twelve lines by Milton:--

"Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow'r'd
Op'ning their various colours, and made gay
Her bosom smelling sweet; and, these scarce blown,
Forth flourish'd thick the clust'ring vine, forth crept
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The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
Embattel'd in her field; and th' _humble shrub,_
_And bush with frizzled hair implicit_: last
Rose, as in dance, the stately trees, and spread
Their branches hung with copious fruits, or gemm'd
Their blossoms; with high woods the hills were crown'd;
With tufts the valleys and each fountain side;
With borders long the rivers."

Only to learn, and be made to understand, these twelve lines thoroughly would teach a youth more of true botany than an entire Cyclopaedia of modern nomenclature and description: they are, like all Milton's work, perfect in accuracy of epithet, while consummate in concentration. Exquisite in touch, as infinite in breadth, they gather into their unbroken clause of melodious compass the conception at once of the Columbian prairie, the English cornfield, the Syrian vineyard, and the Indian grove. But even Milton has left untold, and for the instant perhaps unthought of, the most solemn difference of rank between the low and lofty trees, not in magnitude only, nor in grace, but in duration.

8. Yet let us pause before passing to this greater subject, to dwell more closely on what he has told us so clearly,--the difference in Grace, namely, between the trees that rise 'as in dance,' and 'the bush with frizzled hair.' For the bush form is essentially one taken by vegetation in some kind of distress; scorched by heat, discouraged by darkness, or bitten by frost; it is the form in which isolated knots of earnest plant life stay {210} the flux of fiery sands, bind the rents of tottering crags, purge the stagnant air of cave or chasm, and fringe with sudden hues of unhoped spring the Arctic edge of retreating desolation.

On the other hand, the trees which, as in sacred dance, make the borders of the rivers glad with their procession, and the mountain ridges statelier with their pride, are all expressions of the vegetative power in its accomplished felicities; gathering themselves into graceful companionship with the fairest arts and serenest life of man; and providing not only the sustenance and the instruments, but also the lessons and the delights, of that life, in perfectness of order, and unblighted fruition of season and time.

9. 'Interitura'--yet these not to-day, nor to-morrow, nor with the decline of the summer's sun. We describe a plant as small or great; and think we have given account enough of its nature and being. But the chief question for the plant, as for the human creature, is the Number of its days; for to the tree, as to its master, the words are forever true--"As thy Day is, so shall thy Strength be."

10. I am astonished hourly, more and more, at the apathy and stupidity which have prevented me hitherto from learning the most simple facts at the base of this question! Here is this myrtille bush in my hand--its cluster of some fifteen or twenty delicate green branches knitting themselves downwards into the stubborn brown {211} of a stem on which my knife makes little impression. I have not the slightest idea how old it is, still less how old it might one day have been if I had not gathered it; and, less than the least, what hinders it from becoming as old as it likes! What doom is there over these bright green sprays, that they may never win to any height or space of verdure, nor persist beyond their narrow scope of years?

11. And the more I think the more I bewilder myself; for these bushes, which are pruned and clipped by the deathless Gardener into these lowly thickets of bloom, do not strew the ground with fallen branches and faded clippings in any wise,--it is the pining umbrage of the patriarchal trees that tinges the ground and betrays the foot beneath them: but, under the heather and the Alpine rose.--Well, what _is_ under them, then? I never saw, nor thought of looking,--will look presently under my own bosquets and beds of lingering heather-blossom: beds indeed they were only a month since, a foot deep in flowers, and close in tufted cushions, and the mountain air that floated over them rich in honey like a draught of metheglin.

12. Not clipped, nor pruned, I think, after all,--nor dwarfed in the gardener's sense; but pausing in perpetual youth and strength, ordained out of their lips of roseate infancy. Rose-trees--the botanists have falsely called the proudest of them; yet not trees in any wise, they, nor doomed to know the edge of axe at their {212} roots, nor the hoary waste of time, or searing thunderstroke, on sapless branches. Continual morning for them, and _in_ them; they themselves an Aurora, purple and cloudless, stayed on all the happy hills. That shall be our name for them, in the flushed Phoenician colour of their height, in calm or tempest of the heavenly sea; how much holier than the depth of the Tyrian! And the queen of them on our own Alps shall be 'Aurora Alpium.'[61]

13. There is one word in the Miltonian painting of them which I must lean on specially; for the accurate English of it hides deep morality no less than botany. 'With hair _implicit_.' The interweaving of complex band, which knits the masses of heath or of Alpine rose into their dense tufts and spheres of flower, is to be noted both in these, and in stem structure of a higher order like that of the stone pine, for an expression of the instinct of the plant gathering itself into protective unity, whether against cold or heat, while the forms of the trees which have no hardship to sustain are uniformly based on the effort of each spray to _separate_ itself from its fellows to the utmost, and obtain around its own leaves the utmost space of air.

In vulgar modern English, the term 'implicit' used of Trust or Faith, has come to signify only its serenity. But the Miltonian word gives the _reason_ of serenity: {213} the root and branch intricacy of closest knowledge and fellowship.

14. I have said that Milton has told us more in these few lines than any botanist could. I will prove my saying by placing in comparison with them two passages of description by the most imaginative and generally well-trained scientific man since Linnaeus--Humboldt--which, containing much that is at this moment of special use to us, are curious also in the confusion even of the two orders of annual and perennial plants, and show, therefore, the extreme need of most careful initial work in this distinction of the reign of Cora from that of Kronos.

"The disk of the setting sun appeared like a globe of fire suspended over the savannah; and its last rays, as they swept the earth, illumined the extremities of the grass, strongly agitated by the evening breeze. In the low and humid places of the equinoxial zone, even when the gramineous plants and reeds present the aspect of a meadow, of turf, a rich decoration of the picture is usually wanting. I mean that variety of wild flowers which, scarcely rising above the grass, seem to lie upon a smooth bed of verdure. Between the tropics, the strength and luxury of vegetation give such a development to plants, that the smallest of the dicotyledonous family become shrubs.[62] It would seem as if the {214} liliaceous plants, mingled with the gramina, assumed the place of the flowers of our meadows. Their form is indeed striking; they dazzle by the variety and splendor of their colours; but, too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious relation which exists among the plants that compose our meadows and our turf. Nature, in her beneficence, has given the landscape under every zone its peculiar type of beauty.

"After proceeding four hours across the savannahs, we entered into a little wood composed of shrubs and small trees, which is called El Pejual; no doubt because of the great abundance of the 'Pejoa' (Gaultheria odorata,) a plant with very odoriferous leaves. The steepness of the mountain became less considerable, and we felt an indescribable pleasure in examining the plants of this region. Nowhere, perhaps, can be found collected together in so small a space of ground, productions so beautiful, and so remarkable in regard to the geography of plants. At the height of a thousand toises, the lofty savannahs of the hills terminate in a zone of shrubs, which by their appearance, their tortuous branches, their stiff leaves, and the dimensions and beauty of their purple flowers, remind us of what is called in the Cordilleras of the Andes the vegetation of the _paramos_[63] and the _punas_. We find there the {215} family of the Alpine rhododendrons, the thibaudias, the andromedas, the vacciniums, and those befarias[64] with resinous leaves, which we have several times compared to the rhododendron of our European Alps.

"Even when nature does not produce the same species in analogous climates, either in the plains of isothermal parallels, or on table-lands the temperature of which resembles that of places nearer the poles, we still remark a striking resemblance of appearance and physiognomy in the vegetation of the most distant countries. This phenomenon is one of the most curious in the history of organic forms. I say the history; for in vain would reason forbid man to form hypotheses on the origin of things: he is not the less tormented with these insoluble problems of the distribution of beings."

15. Insoluble--yes, assuredly, poor little beaten phantasms of palpitating clay that we are--and who asked us to solve it? Even this Humboldt, quiet-hearted and modest watcher of the ways of Heaven, in the real make of him, came at last to be so far puffed up by his vain science in declining years that he must needs write a Kosmos of things in the Universe, forsooth, as if he knew all about them! when he was not able meanwhile, (and does not seem even to have desired the ability,) to put the slightest Kosmos into his own 'Personal Narrative'; but leaves one to gather what one wants out of {216} its wild growth; or rather, to wash or winnow what may be useful out of its debris, without any vestige either of reference or index; and I must look for these fragmentary sketches of heath and grass through chapter after chapter about the races of the Indian and religion of the Spaniard,--these also of great intrinsic value, but made useless to the general reader by interspersed experiment on the drifts of the wind and the depths of the sea.

16. But one more fragment out of a note (vol. iii., p. 494) I must give, with reference to an order of the Rhododendrons as yet wholly unknown to me.

"The name of vine tree, 'uvas camaronas' (Shrimp grapes?) is given in the Andes to plants of the genus Thibaudia on account of their _large succulent fruit_. Thus the ancient botanists give the name of Bear's vine, 'Uva Ursi,' and vine of Mount Ida, 'Vitis Idea,' to an Arbutus and Myrtillus which belong, like the Thibaudiae, to the family of the Ericineae."

Now, though I have one entire bookcase and half of another, and a large cabinet besides, or about fifteen feet square of books on botany beside me here, and a quantity more at Oxford, I have no means whatever, in all the heap, of finding out what a Thibaudia is like. Loudon's Cyclopaedia, the only general book I have, tells me only that it will grow well in camellia houses, that its flowers develope at Christmas, and that they are beautifully varied like a fritillary: whereupon I am very anxious to see them, and taste their fruit, and be able to {217} tell my pupils something intelligible of them,--a new order, as it seems to me, among my Oreiades. But for the present I can make no room for them, and must be content, for England and the Alps, with my single class, Myrtilla, including all the fruit-bearing and (more or less) myrtle-leaved kinds; and Azalea for the fruitless flushing of the loftier tribes; taking the special name 'Aurora' for the red and purple ones of Europe, and resigning the already accepted 'Rhodora' to those of the Andes and Himalaya.

17. Of which also, with help of earnest Indian botanists, I hope nevertheless to add some little history to that of our own Oreiades; but shall set myself on the most familiar of them first, as I partly hinted in taking for the frontispiece of this volume two unchecked shoots of our commonest heath, in their state of full lustre and decline. And now I must go out and see and think--and for the first time in my life--what becomes of all these fallen blossoms, and where my own mountain Cora hides herself in winter; and where her sweet body is laid in its death.

Think of it with me, for a moment before I go. That harvest of amethyst bells, over all Scottish and Irish and Cumberland hill and moorland; what substance is there in it, yearly gathered out of the mountain winds,--stayed there, as if the morning and evening clouds had been caught out of them and woven into flowers; 'Ropes of sea-sand'--but that is child's magic {218} merely, compared to the weaving of the Heath out of the cloud. And once woven, how much of it is forever worn by the Earth? What weight of that transparent tissue, half crystal and half comb of honey, lies strewn every year dead under the snow?

I must go and look, and can write no more to-day; nor to-morrow neither. I must gather slowly what I see, and remember; and meantime leaving, to be dealt with afterwards, the difficult and quite separate question of the production of _wood_, I will close this first volume of Proserpina with some necessary statements respecting the operations, serviceable to other creatures than themselves, in which the lives of the noblest plants are ended: honourable in this service equally, though evanescent, some,--in the passing of a breeze--or the dying of a day;--and patient some, of storm and time, serene in fruitful sanctity, through all the uncounted ages which Man has polluted with his tears. _

Read next: Chapter 13. The Seed And Husk

Read previous: Chapter 11. Genealogy

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