X. CROSSMOUNT 429

199. Meantime, restraining the ideals and assuaging the disappointments of my outer-world life, the home-work went on with entirely useful steadiness. The admiration of tree-branches taught me at Fontainebleau,¹ led me now into careful discernment of their species; and while my father, as was his custom, read to my mother and me for half-an-hour after breakfast, I always had a fresh-gathered outer spray of a tree before me, of which the mode of growth, with a single leaf full size, had to be done at that sitting in fine pen outline, filled with the simple colour of the leaf at one wash. On fine days, when the grass was dry, I used to lie down on it and draw the blades as they grew, with the ground herbage of buttercup or hawkweed mixed among them, until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became an infinite picture and possession to me, and the grace and adjustment to each other of growing leaves, a subject of more curious interest to me than the composition of any painter’s masterpiece.² The love of complexity and quantity before noticed³ as influencing my preference of flamboyant to purer architecture, was here satisfied, without qualifying sense of wasted labour, by what I felt to be the constant working of Omnipotent kindness in the fabric of the food-giving tissues of the earth; nor less, morning after morning, did I rejoice in the traceries and the painted glass of the sky at sunrise.

This physical study had, I find, since 1842, when it began, advanced in skill until now in 1847, at Leamington, it had proceeded into botanical detail; and the collection of material for Proserpina began then, singularly, with the analysis of a thistle-top, as the foundation of all my political economy was dug down to, through the thistle-field of Crossmount.

¹ [See above, pp. 314, 315. The study of trees here introduced (Plate XXXII.) belongs to the year 1846.]

² [Compare Mrs. Arthur Severn’s recollection given in Vol. V. p. 164 n., and see such studies as Plate 6 in the same volume (p. 164) and Plate 18 in Vol. XVI. (p. 395).]

³ [The reference may be to §§ 56, 114-115, 186 (pp. 296, 349-350, 415-416); or, more probably, to a passage which Ruskin forgot he had omitted, and which is now given at p. 157 n.]

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