Proserpina, Volume 1 Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew

1. In the course of the preceding chapter, I hope that the reader has obtained, or may by a little patience both obtain and secure, the idea of a great natural Ordinance, which,...

1. Returning, after more than a year's sorrowful interval, to my Sicilian fields,--not incognisant, now, of some of the darker realms of Proserpina; and with feebler heart, and,...

1. As I read over again, with a fresh mind, the last chapter, I am struck by the opposition of states which seem best to fit a weed for a weed's work,--stubbornness, namely, and...

1. In the first of the poems of which the English Government has appointed a portion to be sung every day for the instruction and pleasure of the people, there occurs this curio...

1. On the quiet road leading from under the Palatine to the little church of St. Nereo and Achilleo, I met, yesterday morning, group after group of happy peasants heaped in pyra...

1. The elementary study of methods of growth, given in the following chapter, has been many years written, (the greater part soon after the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters');...

1. Chancing to take up yesterday a favourite old book, Mavor's British Tourists, (London, 1798,) I found in its fourth volume a delightful diary of a journey made in 1782 throug...

1. Plants in their perfect form consist of four principal parts,--the Root, Stem, Leaf, and Flower. It is true that the stem and flower are parts, or remnants, or altered states...

1. Of all the lovely wild plants--and few, mountain-bred, in Britain, are other than lovely,--that fill the clefts and crest the ridges of my Brantwood rock, the dearest to me,...

1. It is mortifying enough to write,--but I think thus much ought to be written,--concerning myself, as 'the author of Modern Painters.' In three months I shall be fifty years o...

1. Some ten or twelve years ago, I bought--three times twelve are thirty-six--of a delightful little book by Mrs. Gatty, called 'Aunt Judy's Tales'--whereof to make presents to...

Yesterday evening I was looking over the first book in which I studied Botany,--Curtis's Magazine, published in 1795 at No. 3, St. George's Crescent, Blackfriars Road, and sold...

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 i...

1. Not the least sorrowful, nor least absurd of the confusions brought on us by unscholarly botanists, blundering into foreign languages, when they do not know how to use their...

1. Philologists are continually collecting instances, like our friend the French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin of unfinished, in the imitat...