§ 9. Among the greater masters, as I have said, there is little laborious or affectionate flower-painting. The utmost that Turner ever allows in his foregrounds is a water-lily or two, a cluster of heath or foxglove, a thistle sometimes, a violet or daisy, or a bindweed-bell; just enough to lead the eye into the understanding of the rich mystery of his more distant leafage. Rich mystery, indeed, respecting which these following facts about the foliage of tented plants must be noted carefully. § 10. Two characters seem especially aimed at by Nature in the earth-plants: first, that they should be characteristic and interesting; secondly, that they should not be very visibly injured by crushing. I say, first, characteristic. The leaves of large trees take approximately simple forms, slightly monotonous. They are intended to be seen in mass. But the leaves of the herbage at our feet take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in outstripping our wonder. § 11. Secondly, observe, their forms are such as will not be visibly injured by crushing. Their complexity is already disordered: jags and rents are their laws of being; rent by the footstep they betray no harm. Here, for instance (Fig. 72), is the mere outline of a buttercup-leaf in full free growth; which, perhaps, may be taken as a good common type of earth foliage. Fig. 73 is a less advanced one, placed so as to show its symmetrical bounding form. But both, how various;--how delicately rent into beauty! As in the aiguilles of the great Alps, so in this lowest field-herb, where rending is the law of being, it is the law of loveliness. [Illustration: FIG. 72.] § 12. One class, however, of these torn leaves, peculiar to the tented plants, has, it seems to me, a strange expressional function. I mean the group of leaves rent into _alternate_ gaps, typically represented by the thistle. The alternation of the rent, if not absolutely, is effectively, peculiar to the earth-plants. Leaves of the builders are rent symmetrically, so as to form radiating groups, as in the horse-chestnut, or they are irregularly sinuous, as in the oak; but the earth-plants continually present forms such as those in the opposite Plate: a kind of web-footed leaf, so to speak; a continuous tissue, enlarged alternately on each side of the stalk. Leaves of this form have necessarily a kind of limping gait, as if they grew not all at once, but first a little bit on one side, and then a little bit on the other, and wherever they occur in quantity, give the expression to foreground vegetation which we feel and call "ragged." [Illustration: FIG. 73.] [Illustration: 60. The Rending of Leaves.]