And what
is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the disorder of the
scattered blossoms;--of all flowers I know, this is the strangest, in the
way that here and there, only in their cluster, its bells rise or remain,
and it always looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top of
the cluster broken short away altogether.
8. We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to
be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.
But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to
entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are
meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens,
therefore--to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged
wasps in it,--and perceive therewith the following particulars.
9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a
little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is
grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old
fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out
in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into a kind of
fringe.
Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster of stiff white
hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the hood; for no imaginable purpose
of use or decoration--any more than a hearth-brush put for a
helmet-crest,--and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower
petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or shark-like jaw,
edged with ghastly teeth,--and yet more, that the hollow within begins to
suggest a resemblance to an open throat in which there are two projections
where the lower petal joins the lateral ones, almost exactly like swollen
glands.
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