Capable, even under cultivation, of no perfect beauty, thought reaching
some subdued delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for
the most part they have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,--they
are white without purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant,
without richness; divided, without fineness; massive, without strength;
and slender, without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of
theirs; and of the relations of German and English peasant character to
its food of kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of
palm-fruit), and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming
spirit are in these distinctions of species.
78. Next we take the nuts and apples,--the nuts representing one of the
groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and the
other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been the
types to the highest races of men, of all passionate temptation, or pure
delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above
the
"Rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol.
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