121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as
_judge;_ watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and
prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of
the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly
multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their
skill, and inexorable upon their labour.
21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care
in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many
executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and
later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of
the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a
consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon
jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in
a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]
22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many
illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the
nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by
ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the
original drawings at Oxford for the 'Flora Graeca,' or the nobly engraved
plates executed in the close of the last century for the 'Flora Danica' and
'Flora Londinensis.
Pages:
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95