Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/370

236 beauties now unobserved, even in the fair forms of my most familiar favourites. The extreme beauty of each bell of the Foxglove will well repay a minute examination: even a cursory glance tells us how gracefully swelling is its outline, and how rich its colour; but look within, where the variously-shaped markings of deep marone, like the spots on a leopard's skin, are edged with a lighter bordering than the ground-colour of the corolla, shewing the pattern more distinctly. Then, attached to the upper side of the bells, and so hidden from us, as they hang round the stem and look modestly down, are the long white filaments, with their fine yellow anthers, so placed as to be in no danger of receiving injury from rain, to avoid which many flowers are endowed with the power of closing the corolla, such as the Daisy, Pimpernel, Marygold, &c., and thereby preserving their various minute organs of fructification unhurt; but the arrangement of the Foxglove's stamens renders this beautiful precaution needless; they lie safely nestling beneath their rich purple dome-like canopy, curtained from wind and storm. There is something very curious, too, in the manner the mouths of the Foxglove bells are pursed up before expanding;—they look as if compelled to keep a secret against their own inclination, and ready to burst to divulge it; yet, full of swelling importance and sedate wisdom, merely nod their clever heads, with a look of "I could an' I would;" and then some sun-shiny day, the lips that have been growing brighter and brighter, and pouting with yet more