"Sweet atmosphere of hazy blue,
So leisurely, so soothing, so forgiving,
That sometimes makes New England fit for living."
He revelled in the blue tints of water, of snow, of ice; in "the blueness and softness of a mild winter day." The constant blueness of the sky at night thrilled him with "an everlasting surprise," as did the blue shadows within the woods and the blueness of distant woods. How he would have rejoiced in Monet's paintings, how true he would have found their tones. He even idealized blueberries, "a very innocent ambrosial taste, as if made of ether itself, as they are colored with it."
Thoreau was ever ready in thought of Proserpina gathering flowers. He offers to her the Lupine, the Blue-eyed Grass, and the Tufted Vetch, "blue, inclining in spots to purple"; it affected him deeply to see such an abundance of blueness in the grass. "Celestial color, I see it afar in masses on the hillside near the meadow—so much blue."
I usually join with Thoreau in his flower loves; but I cannot understand his feeling toward the blue Flag; that, after noting the rich fringed recurved parasols over its anthers, and its exquisite petals, that he could say it is "a little too showy and gaudy, like some women's bonnets." I note that whenever he compares flowers to women it is in no flattering humor to either; which is, perhaps, what we expect from a man who chose to be a bachelor and a hermit. His love of obscure and small flowers might explain his sentiment toward the radiant and dominant blue Flag.
The most valued flower of my childhood, outside the garden, was a little sister of the Iris—the Blue-eyed Grass. To find it blooming was a triumph, for it was not very profuse of growth near my home; to gather it a delight; why, I know not, since the tiny blooms promptly closed and withered as soon as we held them in our warm little hands. Colonel Higginson writes wittily of the Blue-eyed Grass, "It has such an annoying way of shutting up its azure orbs the moment you gather it; and you reach home with a bare stiff blade which deserves no better name than Sisyrinchium anceps."
The only time I ever played truant was to run off one June morning to find "the starlike gleam amid the grass and dew"; to pick Blue-eyed Grass in a field to which I was conducted by another naughty girl. I was simple enough to come home at mid-day with my hands full of the stiff blades and tightly closed blooms; and at my mother's inquiry as to my acquisition of these treasures, I promptly burst into tears. I was then told, in impressive phraseology adapted to my youthful comprehension, and with the flowers as eloquent proof, that all stolen pleasures were ever like my coveted flowers, withered and unsightly as soon as gathered—which my mother believed was true.
The blossoms of this little Iris seem to lie on the surface of the grass like a froth of blueness; they gaze up at the sky with a sort of intimacy as if they were a part of it. Thoreau called it an "air of easy sympathy." The slightest clouding or grayness of atmosphere makes them turn away and close.
The naming of Proserpina leads me to say this: that to grow in love and knowledge of flowers, and above all of blue flowers, you must read Ruskin's Proserpina. It is a book of botany, of studies of plants, but begemmed with beautiful sentences and thoughts and expressions, with lessons of pleasantness which you can never forget, of pictures which you never cease to see, such sentences and pictures as this:—
"Rome. My father's Birthday. I found the loveliest blue Asphodel I ever saw in my life in the fields beyond Monte Mario—a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in the Elysian Fields, some day!"