Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for
that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and
on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.
And on Thursday, the _eighth or ninth_ day from Paris, days all spent
patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps
unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and
cloud.
8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such
travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling
well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not
be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with
sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness
of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of
education for youth;--and my certainty that a true knowledge of their
native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions
of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me
to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And
of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the
details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort,
whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then
walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges,
west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being
then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and
distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do
anything serious,--then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the
strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone
crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don't find a single note of its preferences
or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it
chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it
condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.
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