DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0263
251
CHAPTER XXIV.
‘PROSERPINA’ (1875-1886).
This gentle, ardent, and boyish boy must have breathed
hard and close over his collections of minerals and
plants. He was unsatisfied with knowledge, and the
books, few and arid, in which he looked for figures and
definitions, although good in the main and sure of his
respect, failed him as the “modern science” of later
times was to fail him : he charged them with futile
words and with the blanks, instead of answers, that
met some of his pertinent questions. What he began
over a boy’s cabinet and herbarium he never afterwards
forsook. He was a reader—and an untiring one —
only in the second place; he studied crystallisation
and plants, as he studied the spiritual nature of man,
at first hand. Proserpina, a book of botany made
lovely, was written “ to put, if it might be, some
elements of the science . . . into a form more tenable
by ordinary human and childish faculties ” than had
been the form wherewith the faculties, human and
childish in the highest sense, of his own elect boyhood
CHAPTER XXIV.
‘PROSERPINA’ (1875-1886).
This gentle, ardent, and boyish boy must have breathed
hard and close over his collections of minerals and
plants. He was unsatisfied with knowledge, and the
books, few and arid, in which he looked for figures and
definitions, although good in the main and sure of his
respect, failed him as the “modern science” of later
times was to fail him : he charged them with futile
words and with the blanks, instead of answers, that
met some of his pertinent questions. What he began
over a boy’s cabinet and herbarium he never afterwards
forsook. He was a reader—and an untiring one —
only in the second place; he studied crystallisation
and plants, as he studied the spiritual nature of man,
at first hand. Proserpina, a book of botany made
lovely, was written “ to put, if it might be, some
elements of the science . . . into a form more tenable
by ordinary human and childish faculties ” than had
been the form wherewith the faculties, human and
childish in the highest sense, of his own elect boyhood