But let us not stand haggling over such contentious matter. Revenons à nos moutons!
Scanning these fields and slopes, noting “the lavish hand of June,” and remembering that July’s hand will be no whit less lavish, we realise without any difficulty that there are more than twice as many flowering plants indigenous to Switzerland as in the whole of the British Isles. Indeed, June alone could easily convince us of this. What wealth! One feels that the proper way, the only adequate way of enjoying it is to abjure hotels and camp out in the midst of it all. When the meal-time bell rings out from the Hôtel-Pension, one turns in answer to it with reluctance, declaring:
“I could be content to see
June and no variety,
Loitering here, and living there,
With a book and frugal fare,
With a finer gypsy time,
And a cuckoo in the clime.”
And when the end of June arrives, and with it the Arnica, the Greater Astrantia, the orange-red Hawkweed, the Burnet butterfly, and the passage of the bell-decked cows to the higher Alpine pastures—“Liauba! Liauba! por alpa!”—we may tremble for the coming of the scythe. Already it will be commencing its deadly work 2,000 feet below, and its advance is rapid and quite regardless of all we flower-lovers may mutter under our breath, or more probably say aloud. However, we must be reasonable. Complaints of this description are not in order. The world must be helped round: hay must be made, and the flowers are not, and cannot be, our all-in-all. We benefit most by being seasonable; sufficient for the day is the good thereof; and the good of a day need not die with the day. We take our fill of these flowers whilst we reasonably may; recollection does the rest for us in the gap of seasons. An emotion passed is yet part of our life—our life’s memory; and, in Meredith’s words,
“Dead seasons quicken in one petal spot of colour unforgot.”