87. Then the spirit of these Draconidae seems to pass more or less into
other flowers, whose forms are properly pure vases; but it affects some
of them slightly, others not at all. It never strongly affects the
heaths; never once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the
buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque
centre, and a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense, yet impure,
glittering on the surface as if it were strewn with broken glass, and
stained or darkening irregularly into red. And then at last the serpent
charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and makes it poisonous. It
enters into the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is
corrupted into the viper's bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as
the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn; it enters, together
with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, and (though with a
greater interval between the groups) they change to spotted orchideae; it
touches the poppy, it becomes a fumaria; the iris, and it pouts into a
gladiolus; the lily, and it chequers itself into a snake's-head, and
secretes in the deep of its bell, drops, not of venom indeed, but
honey-dew, as if it were a healing serpent.
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