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430 PRÆTERITA-II
200. “Analysis” of thistle-top, I say; not “dissection,” nor microscopic poring into.
Flowers, like everything else that is lovely in the visible world, are only to be seen rightly with the eyes which the God who made them gave us; and neither with microscopes nor spectacles.1 These have their uses for the curious and the aged; as stilts and crutches have for people who want to walk in mud, or cannot safely walk but on three legs anywhere. But in health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them. The use of the great mechanical powers may indeed sometimes be compatible with the due exercise of our own; but the use of instruments for exaggerating the powers of sight necessarily deprives us of the best pleasures of sight. A flower is to be watched as it grows, in its association with the earth, the air, and the dew; its leaves are to be seen as they expand in sunshine; its colours, as they embroider the field, or illumine the forest. Dissect or magnify them, and all you discover or learn at last will be that oaks, roses, and daisies, are all made of fibres and bubbles; and these again, of charcoal and water; but, for all their peeping and probing, nobody knows how.
201. And far more difficult work than this was on foot in other directions. Too sorrowfully it had now become plain to me that neither George Herbert, nor Richard Hooker, nor Henry Melvill, nor Thomas Dale, nor the Dean of Christ Church, nor the Bishop of Oxford, could in anywise explain to me what Turner meant by the contest of Apollo with the Python, or by the repose of the great dragon above the Garden of the Hesperides.2
For such nearer Python as might wreathe itself against
1 [Compare Art of England, § 118 (Vol. XXXIII. p. 346).]
2 [See ch. x. (“The Nereids’ Guard”) in part ix. of Modern Painters, vol. v.: Vol. VII. pp. 389 seq.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
