1. I do not know if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which, doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford system as in any parental relations whatsoever.
We shall, however, find some very notable relations existing between the two groups of the wild flowers of dry land, which represent, in the widest extent, and the distinctest opposition, the two characters of material serviceableness and unserviceableness; the groups which in our English classification will be easily remembered as those of the Thyme, and the Daisy.
The one, scented as with incense—medicinal—and in all gentle and humble ways, useful. The other, scentless—helpless for ministry to the body; infinitely dear as the bringer of light, ruby, white and gold; the three colours of the Day, with no hue of shade in it. Therefore I
take it on the coins of St. George for the symbol of the splendour or light of heaven, which is dearest where humblest.
2. Now these great two orders—of which the types are the thyme and the daisy—you are to remember generally as the 'Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.' You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers; because the first is a vulgar term; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip, or, in noble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth is like that: and the second is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and generally unluminous—flowers I can scarcely call them—and weeds I will not,—creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she returns to the day from the dead.
But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye—again you see I refuse for them the word weed;—and the waste-loving Chicory, which the Venetians call "Sponsa solis," are all to be held in one class with the
Sunflowers; but dedicate,—the daisy to Alcestis alone; others to Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself: but I can't follow their mythology yet awhile.
3. Now in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in wildness; it is their wildness which is their virtue;—that the thyme is sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their crime,—"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of them you must distinguish between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our duty to tame them; but it must be, to relieve.
4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood, left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut my way into it through a mass of thorny ruin; black, birds-nest like, entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts; knotted stumps of never-blossoming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into merely unctuous
clods and clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It was all Nature's free doing! she had had her way with it to the uttermost; and clearly needed human help and interference in her business; and yet there was not one plant in the whole ruinous and deathful riot of the place, whose nature was not in itself wholesome and lovely; but all lost for want of discipline.