3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a
Foxglove, in the smallest degree. Whether hairs which he can't see are
glandular or bristly,--whether the green knobs, which are left when the
purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,--and
whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like
a rogue's, into any number--are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which
he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in
discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, escaped from the Plutonic
durance of London, and carried by the tubular process, which replaces
Charon's boat, over the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the
Coniston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright is out on the high
fields, she may gather, with a little help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet
of the entire Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and
may see what they are like, altogether.
4. She shall gather: first, the Euphrasy, which makes the turf on the brow
of the hill glitter as if with new-fallen manna; then, from one of the blue
clusters on the top of the garden wall, the common bright blue Speedwell;
and, from the garden bed beneath, a dark blue spire of Veronica spicata;
then, at the nearest opening into the wood, a little foxglove in its first
delight of shaking out its bells; then--what next does the Doctor say?--a
snapdragon? we must go back into the garden for that--here is a goodly
crimson one, but what the little speedwell will think of him for a relative
_I_ can't think!--a mullein?--that we must do without for the moment; a
monkey flower?--that we will do without, altogether; a lady's slipper?--say
rather a goblin's with the gout! but, such as the flower-cobbler has made
it, here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the greenhouse,--and
yet a figwort we must have, too; which I see on referring to Loudon, may be
balm-leaved, hemp-leaved, tansy-leaved, nettle-leaved, wing-leaved,
heart-leaved, ear-leaved, spear-leaved, or lyre-leaved.
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