The naming of Proserpina leads me to say this: that to grow in love and knowledge of flowers, and above all of blue flowers, you must read Ruskin's _Proserpina_. It is a book of botany, of studies of plants, but begemmed with beautiful sentences and thoughts and expressions, with lessons of pleasantness which you can never forget, of pictures which you never cease to see, such sentences and pictures as this:-- "Rome. My father's Birthday. I found the loveliest blue Asphodel I ever saw in my life in the fields beyond Monte Mario--a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in the Elysian Fields, some day!" Oh, the power of written words! when by these few lines I can carry forever in my inner vision this spire of starry blueness. To that writer, now in the Elysian Fields, an honest teacher if ever one lived, I send my thanks for this beautiful vision of blueness. CHAPTER XII PLANT NAMES "The fascination of plant names is founded on two instincts,--love of Nature and curiosity about Language." --_English Plant Names_, REV. JOHN EARLE, 1880. Verbal magic is the subtle mysterious power of certain words. This power may come from association with the senses; thus I have distinct sense of stimulation in the word scarlet, and pleasure in the words lucid and liquid. The word garden is a never ceasing delight; it seems to me Oriental; perhaps I have a transmitted sense from my grandmother Eve of the Garden of Eden. I like the words, a Garden of Olives, a Garden of Herbs, the Garden of the Gods, a Garden enclosed, Philosophers of the Garden, the Garden of the Lord. As I have written on gardens, and thought on gardens, and walked in gardens, "the very music of the name has gone into my being." How beautiful are Cardinal Newman's words:-- "By a garden is meant mystically a place of spiritual repose, stillness, peace, refreshment, delight."