RAMBLES ^ -. AY^llEAVES BRAMBLES BAY LEAVES: ESSAYS ON THINGS HOMELY AND BEAUTIFUL. SHIELEY HIBBEED, AUTHOB OP " BTJSTIC ADORNMENTS FOB HOMES OP TASTE, "THE TOWN GABDEN," ETC., ETC. The common, the terrestrial, thou may'st see, With serviceable cunning knit together, The nearest with the nearest; and therein 1 trust thee and believe thee ! But wliate'er, full of mysterious import, Nature weaves And fashions in the depths the spiiit's ladder, That from this gross and visible world of dust, Kven to the starry world, with thousand rounds, Builds itself up; on which the unseen powers Move up and down on heavenly ministries The circles in the circles, that approach The central sun with ever- narrow ing orbit T.'iese kee the glance alone, the unsealed eye." Schiller's Piccolomtni. CoLEuIOCEi THIRD EDITION. LONDON : GROOMBRLDGE AND SONS, 5, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXII. LONDON : R. BARRETT AND SONS, PRINTERS, MARK LANE. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. THOUGH somewhat miscellaneous in subject, tlie reader will perceive a consonance of purpose in the various Essays contained in this volume. The papers were written at various times during the intervals of severe, though not uncongenial duties, and are but several expressions of the same sentiment. That sentiment is the love of Nature, and more especially of that portion of Nature which is represented in the out-door life of " green things," embodying, as they do, a thousand suggestions of their relations to the life of man, closely woven and encircled as he is by a network of beauty, which gives a joy to his calmer hours, and enables him to perceive, both by reason and analogy, his position in the general scheme of creation. If the love of simple things does no more for us than to quicken our perceptions, and enlarge the circle of our pleasures, it is certainly a love which, in that direction, exalts us, and gives us many whisperings of the greatness of the Power under whose con- trol the worlds perform their ceaseless march, and the seasons observe the times appointed them. If we can now and then turn aside from the common-place of daily life a life fraught with tendencies to deaden the finer sympathies of our nature if we can now and then turn aside to breathe and enjoy the cool air of mountain groves, and to listen to the irusic of falling waters, and 2091255 IV PREPACK. i lie murmnrs of many voices we shall thereby enlarge the circle of our emotions, and quicken our sense of appreciation for things which lie around and above us. This ministration of dew-drops and red sunsets is not appointed in vain ; it is a ministration to the heart rather than to the brain of man, and teaches him the lesson of his moral life, of which, under the excitement of worldly avocations, he too often becomes oblivious. These papers, such as they are, are expressions of thoughts arising out of the observation of natural changes and simple things, all of which, viewed through the imagination with the help of thought, afford us an insight into the poetical uses of natural forms and phenomena, and add to our life solaces and resources, for the augmentation of our earthly joy, The merits and demerits of " BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES " are equally to be attributed to enthusiasm ; and should my enthusiasm, as expressed herein, prove welcome to a few congenial spirits, 1 shall have the satisfaction of having added to the enjoyments of those who see in a wavside pebble, or a green leaf, a suoject for meditation not to be exhausted at one etfort. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. the first edition of " BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES" had been committed to the press, a dark cloud overspread my domestic life, and rendered me altogether careless whether the book should rind readers, or make its way silently and secretly to the trunk- maker or cheesemonger. The cloud has not cleared away, hut has changed its form, and acquired a few additional touches of black- ness ; though, thank God, it has a golden fringe, so that there are gleams of light afar off. I name this fact to explain that not the slightest effort was ever made to give publicity to the work, and but one single guinea was expended in advertising it. Yet the edition has been sold, and a new one demanded ; making good an observation, which I think Mr. Dickens is the author of, that a good book will find readers, even if privately printed, and utterly denied the assistance of an art known in the book trade as " push- ing." It is no doubt bold of me to take credit to myself that this is "a good book;" but I may as well confess that I so regard it, else why should I publish it? In truth, the sale of the edition is to be attributed solely to the kindness of reviewers, who made it known for me, when I simply contented myself to place it on a publisher's shelf; and their generous recommendations of it demand from me this acknowledgment and record of thanks. VI PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. In preparing this edition for the press, a few papers have been omitted, because the lapse of time had destroyed their value. The places of those few papers have been filled up with essays written for the work. The reviewers of the first edition are not respon- sible for these; and if this edition is anywhere deemed worthy of notice, it is but right I should call attention to the papers on "The Rainbow" and " Fido Fides," as new, and as expounding views in which, possibly, neither my reviewers nor my readers will concur. S. H. CONTENTS. The Story of a Blade of Grass L The Season of Buttercups .... 35 A Happy Family . . . . . .46 The Joy of a Garden ..... 66 The Soul in Nature ...... 88 The Sparrow ...... 98 The Inner Life . . . . . .109 The Land of Blackberries . 120 The Soul of Song . . . . . .135 The Mysterious Balance . . . , . 145 The Poetry of Chemistry . . . . .156 Meditations on a Broomstick .... 168 The Season of Brown Leaves ..... 284 Floral Antiquities of the East .... 194 Floral Symbols ...... 218 Fairy Rings ...... 233 The Rainbow ....... 345 Fido Fides . .... 263 Memories of Mischief . t 2QO Summer Pictures ...... 289 The Love of Flowers . , . . #01 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. " WHAT a desert-like spot would this life of oura bo, If, amid sands of sin, no glimpse could we see Of some green-knotted garland of grass, Some oasis bright, a glad hope to impart, That the sun of the sky, and the sun of the heart, Still abide in the road we must pass." JOHNSON BARKER. a The golden-belted bees humm'd in the air, The tall silk-grasses bent and waved along." THOMAS MILI.KH. " We cannot pass a blade of grass unheeded by the way, For it whispers to our thoughts, and we its silent voice obey." J. E. CABPENTEB. IT has become the fashion to study " Common Things," and extort biographies from insects, birds, aiid flowers. I shall conform to fashion in twining a garland of literary " Brambles and Bay Leaves," and shall escape censure as to the choice of the subject for this paper, at least, because a blade of grass is the commonest of common things, and has as good and copious a bio- graphy as the rarest curiosity that has ever been placed B 2 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. into this professedly simple category. A story, certes, should be in chapters, have a beginning and an end, and at the end a moral. My story shall conform to rule just as its subject is in the way of fashion, and the first thought that occurs to me will be the best to lead off with for Chapter I. THE COLOUR OF IT. It is a significant fact, that Nature uses but few colours in the painting of her many pictures. The scenery of the whole world, with all its diversities of hill and dale, land and sea, mountain and valley, exhibit chiefly the several shades of blue and green, which are respectively the emblems of heaven and earth. It is very simple; but with what cunning art does Nature trick out an infinity of wild beauty, dotting each little spot of the broad earth with a picture of its own, which, in all her multitudinous representations, will never be repeated. Philosophers tell us that this blue above and green below is the combination which, while giving the heart and the eye an equal satisfaction and solace, is at the same time the best adapted for the continual exercise of the visual powers. The soft azure heaven, which folds us in its dewy arms, and lifts our souls nearer up to God, is said to derive its beauty from the refraction of the rays of light in passing through the air. The lovely green hue which overspreads the earth like the laughter of Nature herself, and which, by its winning tenderness, seems planted here to make the soul contented with its earthly lot, is caused by the abundant and universal growth of grass, which is, indeed, the poetic spirit of the world, for it hides, with THE STORY OP A BLADE OF GRASS. 3 a delicious verdure, the grim realities of Nature, and clothes the sordid facts of earth and iron with a garment of life and beauty. From the constant freshness, fragrance, and fruitful ness of grass, it has been held in tender regard in all ages of the world, and has mingled alike with the outpourings of the human heart, under the inspirations of poetry, with the voices and harmonies of Nature in her teachings of love, with the struggles of nations for power or freedom, and with the grim scenes wherein the human heart has paid the tribute of its blood to super- stition, oppression, and despotism. It would seem meet, therefore, that something should be said about Grass, in order that those who tread on it unheedingly, may know something of its history ; and that those who have listened to the teachings of the out-door world, and welcomed its verdure into their sanctuary of love, may have its memories and images awakened within them, and so learn to love it more. " Then to the enamell'd meads Thou go'st ; and as thy foot there treads, Thou seest a present God like power Imprinted in each herb and flower." HEEKICK. To mention the greenness of the grass is to awaken at the same time a thousand remembrances of green things generally, for the mind calls them up in numberless pictures, that the heart may feast upon their beauty. " Green things/' and we think of Virgil and his brown, bees; Longus and his happy children; Keats and his green trees, " sprouting a shady boon for simple sheep ;" Chaucer and his imperishable daisies, which he rose early ? -2 4 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. to see " against the sun spread ;" Robin Hood and the Lincoln green ; Shakspere, Spenser, and Herrick, with their multiplied images, pictures, and allusions; all living and fresh from the green world itself, and re- dolent of lime-tree perfume, dank moss, woodland echoes, velvet meadows, and all the associations which cling like halos of light around them. With green things the human heart grows larger, and human life more real for we are fast rooted in the earth, even when imagination makes its boldest flights; and there is a practical suggestion offered us by the blue heaven, which, as a curtain, hides from us the city of God, that the green earth is our best place until His purpose is accomplished. In No. 387 of the Spectator occurs a passage on the colour of grass, which will fit into this place most appro- priately : " There are writers of great distinction who have made it an argument for Providence that the whole earth is covered with green, rather than any other colour, as being such a right mixture of light and shade, that it comforts and strengthens the eye, instead of weakening or grieving it." A word from Sir William Temple may well follow this : " There are besides the temper of our climate two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gar- dens, which are the gravel of our walks, and the almost perpetual greenness of our turf." This chapter cannot better end than with a terse couplet from Dan Chaucer " Colours ue know I non, -jrithouten drede, But swiche colours as gtowen in the mede." FlUMKLEIN'8 '1 XL*, T. 1535. THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. II. WHERE TO FIND IT. Everywhere ! In all climates, all soils, all positions. It will make a prostrate pillar into a cushioned seat for the meditative traveller among the ruins; it does not disdain a home on a dust heap ; I have seen many a brave tuft high up on the shaft of a chimney ; and last summer Poa annua grew luxuriantly at the foot of the statue of King William, on the city side of London Bridge. Many years ago there used to be some fine tufts of this poa, and also cynosurus cristalus, on the square blocks of stone above the steps leading to the water, on the City side of London Bridge, and in the midst of them, rooted firmly in the crevices between the stones, was a little cherry tree. Just about that time M. X. B. Saintine published his charming story of "Picciola," which was translated into almost every lan- guage of the world ; and here, through an abridgement published by the Messrs. Chambers, was read by thousands of persons. I remember once halting in front of the pigmy cherry tree, and revolving in my mind all the points in that enchanting story, in order to make a " Picciola " of it. I think it was a wall-flower which the reflective Charney set his heart upon with a fondness almost fanatic, and it was, therefore, a true prison-flower. But this cherry tree never put forth a blossom, and there was no prison even within sight of it, and by no stretch of the imagination could I make a decent day-dream; while a thousand elbows made a thousand separate thrusts at my ribs and sides, and the business that 6 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. brought me there was being sacrificed by loitering. How rejoiced was I, however, when, in a volume pub- lished by Mr. Alfred Smee (I think it was upon " Instinct "), an account of this tree was given, and its origin traced to the deposit there of a cherry stone by some wandering bird. It always seemed to me, how- ever, that it was much more likely a wandering boy, like myself, after having made a purchase of cherries at the adjoining fruit-stall, had tossed a cherry stone over to the stone buttress, and with a million chances to one against it, the million had failed and the one had triumphed, and the seed took root and sprang up. Alas ! it was like the seed that fell on stony ground, that we read of in one of our Lord's parables, which endured only for a while, and perished. There, too, it once more resembled " Picciola," but there was no pri- soner to appeal for it, arid no emperor to command the lifting of the stone, and the supplying of its roots with a handful of soil to save it. The Graminea comprise thirteen very distinct tribes, over three hundred genera, and not less than fifteen hundred species, of which the British Isles can lay claim to at least a hundred and fifty. There is no part of the world but in which some of the members of the family are to be found. In the tropics they rival oaks in mag- nitude, and mingle with the arborescent vegetation as essential elements of the jungle and the forest; and where life expires in the embraces of perpetual winter, grasses are the last of flowering plants that linger on the verge of those silent regions of frost and death. In South Shetland islands, at an elevation of 7,000 feet, THE STORY OP A. BLADE OF GRASS. 7 Aira antarctica blooms alone in a region of "thick- ribbed ice;" and in the far north, in Iceland, Greenland, and the extreme latitude of 70^, Tri&etum subsp'watum, which has perhaps a greater geographical range than any plant with which we are acquainted, braves the sleet and darkness, and during the short Arctic summer puts forth its pretty blossoms, and ripens abundance of seeds. In the exercise of that spirit of thankful affection, with which the true naturalist surveys the world around him, the universality of grass is a fact accepted as a dis- tinct teaching of the kindly regard for the happiness of all creatures, which is so prominent a feature in the plan of creation. In herbage and grain the grasses furnish a larger amount of sustenance to animal life than all other tribes of plants together ; and so profusely have they been shed abroad in every conceivable variety, as climate, soil, and situation may influence their growth, that the earth has taken their colouring for a garment, and presents a firmament of green almost as unbroken as the upper firmament of blue, which is the only other prevailing tint in Nature. No matter how elevated or how barren the spot, grasses of some kind will make themselves a home in it ; and when every variety of soil and climate has been furnished with its appropriate kinds, others find for themselves sites in water, carpeting the bed of the brook, or binding the shingle together on the shore of the sea ; others on ruins, house-tops, and subterranean retreats, if but a glimpse of daylight reach them. In that remarkable work, "The Flora of the Colosseum/' in which Dr. Deakiu has described 420 8 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. plants found growing spontaneously on the ruins of the Colosseum at Rome, there are no fewer than fifty-six grasses entered as flourishing in various parts of that venerable ruin ; those fifty-six include examples of Aren- aria, Avena, Briza, Bromus, Festuca, Hordeum, Lolium, and Poa, besides that farmer's friend, Anthoxanlhum odoratum, which is said, but erroneously, to be the sole source of the fragrance of the new-mown hay. This universality of grass is one of the most poetical of facts in the economy of the world. There is no place which it will not beautify. It climbs up the steep mountain passes which are inaccessible to man, and forms ledges of green amid the rivings of the crags : it leaps down between steep shelving precipices, and there fastens its slender roots in the dry crevices which the earthquakes had rent long ago, and into which the water trickles when the sunbeams strike the hoary snows above. There it shakes its plumes in the morning light, and flings its sweet, sweet laughing greenness, to the sun; there it creeps and climbs about the mazes of solitude, and weaves its fairy tassels with the wind. It beautifies even that spot, and spreads over the sightless visage of death and darkness the serene beauty of a summer smile, fling, ing its green lustre on the bold granite, and perfuming the lips of morning as she stoops from heaven to kiss the green things of the earth. It makes a moist and yielding carpet over the whole earth, on which the im- petuous may pass with hurried tread, or the feet of beauty linger. Wherever it is seen it makes a velvet carpet of emerald beauty a carpet on which the heavy heart may sometimes tread, but on which joy mostly wanders ; and THE STORY OP A BLADE OP GRASS. from this universality of growth grass derives its name, as will be proved by Chapter III. ITS NAME. The word " grass " means simply that which grows. The Greek xpaar/r, or if*? (anglice grass), must be rendered gramen in the Latin, and gives the idea of something sprouty, verdant, lusty, and herbaceous -par excellence " grass." In the Gothic, it is gras ; in Anglo- Saxon, 5P-aj- ; German, grasz. In the Anglo-Saxon form the more precise meaning is, to grow, to sprout ; applied to grass by the common method of converting generals into particulars. Thus, we get by a slight transition, to the Latin crescere, to grow ; and hence to cress, simply a sprouting herb qnod in agris ubique cresclt, " that which grows in every land ; " grass, if you will, the universal source of verdure. Junius obtains the A S gras from growan, and certainly from one of these two we have the word green; the designation of the colour of grass, and of the cheerful, everyday serviceable garment of nature. IV. ITS USES. All our corn plants are grasses; so a blade of grass is a proper emblem of utility, and of the physical basis of all civilization. Our bread is made of the seed of cereal grasses; our cattle browse the herbage of pasture grasses ; the culture of cereals and the preservation of domestic cattle mark the progress of man from barbarism to indus- trial enterprize, from a degraded subsistence on the precarious crumbs of life, in abject dependence on spon- 10 BRAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. taneous growths and the flesh of wild creatures, to the enjoyment of plenty and comfort, and the establishment of a home. Wherever grass grows, beauty and utility are brought together; society is possible, and life ceases to be a strife and a pain. This chapter might be ex- tended indefinitely, without it being possible to exhaust the subject of it. Corn and sugar, rice and paper, matting, cordage, thatch, the most substantial of our common necessities, and almost all our ordinary beve- rages excepting coffee, tea, and wine are furnished directly, or indirectly, from this wide-spread family of indigenous herbs. Amongst our native grasses are some that accomplish uses little thought of by the collector of specimens for a hortus siccus. Let us take one for an example: here is Psamma arenaria, a British grass, considered rare by inland botanists, but plentiful enough about Hastings, and other parts of the coast. Thousands of acres of land washed by the sea owe their preservation to it, for it forms creeping roots, which extend horizon- tally in all directions in its sandy bed, and it weavesthat sand into a matted felt capable of resisting the denuding action of the tides, and thus prevents the encroachment of the sea, by binding the drifting material of its margin together. Where you find this, you may also lookout for Elymus arenariu-i, Carex arenaria, and Festuca rubra, and you will doubtless find them all combined in pre- serving our sloping shores intact against the sea, where, but for such frail defences, the waters would eat away their boundaries, and swallow up vast tracts of fertile country. The protection of this grass was the subject of an enactment, in 1742, just as, at an earlier date, the Scot- THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 11 tish parliament passed an act to protect Elymus arenaritts. By the act of 1742, the cutting of the grass was prohibited, and the prohibition extended even to the proprietors of the soil. This same grass is the chief defence of the coast of Holland against the encroachments of the ocean; and a closely allied grass, Psamma Ballica, performs a similar service on the sandy coasts of the Baltic. This grass has hard elastic foliage, and tough culms, and at Has- tings has been long in use for the manufacture of baskets, mats, and fancy goods, of which samples were exhibited by Miss Rock, of Hastings, in Class IV. of the United Kingdom Products, in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Suppose a waste of sand, on which, according to the super- ficial dicta, " nothing will grow " place this Hastings' grass on it, and let a thousand delicate fingers find tasteful and useful occupation in the conversion of its stems into articles of household use and ornament, and one despised weed may become the founder of a town, a city, or a colony. Phragmites communis, the common reed of our ditches, is another of these basket grasses, as well as one of the best of thatching materials ; this makes culms of six to ten feet high, which are used to furnish the strong framework on which the finer grasses are woven, in the making of mats and baskets. What the mat grasses accomplish for the defence of sandy shores this giant grass does for river banks and the sloping sides of pools and ditches; its roots convert the loose boundary lines into firm water walls, and stay the progress of denudation. We might take each of the known grasses, and specify their uses, without lapsing into commonplace; but the 12 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. temptation must be resisted, and a sufficiency of illustra- tion found in the few special instances that occur to our memory, as we indite these chapters. Here is the Guinea grass in our collections of growing specimens of graminea. It reminds us of Bobinson Crusoe, whose supplies of corn and rice were obtained in a way that the reader well remembers. The owner of an estate at Slmttleworth, Jamaica, says Mr. Gosse, in his charming Naturalists' Sojourn, received from Africa a cage of finches; with these birds a bag of seeds was shipped to serve them as food during the voyage. The birds died, and the few seeds left were thrown away. Presto ! on the bank where the seed-bag was shaken out, sprang up a splendid mass of grassy herbage ; the horses smelt it out, and left their pasture to crop it, and in time that bank became the favourite feeding ground for the horses and cattle of the estate; and Panicum jumenlorum, the Guinea grass, became famous as the most nourishing of all the grasses used as fodder. All the low land parts of Jamaica are covered with it; and even rocky soils, where few other grasses thrive, produce its dense tussocks of juicy and ever-verdant growth. Here, under the hedge where we have waged a war of extermination against it for years, is the couch-grass, in common parlance the most hateful of all weeds, for it has not the beauty of bear- bine, nor will surface-cleaning remove it, as in the case of our rural weeds. Not long since, the Agricultural Society of Clermont (Oise) recommended that, instead of exterminating this grass, farmers would do well to use it instead of malt in making beer, for, like the rest of the grasses, it is largely productive of saccharine THE STOEY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 13 matter. To make one more step in this catalogue of instances, we may call the perfumer into court, to inform us how it happens that oil of verbena, and other perfumes bearing the same name, are produced from a flower which we generally consider to be without scent altogether, for the true scented verbena is not a verbena at all, but an aloysia. The witness will depose that it is a misnomer, for verbena perfume is in reality the produce of the lemon- grass, Andropogon schtznanthus, a native of India, where it is also used by Europeans as a tea-plant, the infusion of which is tonic, and valuable as a febrifuge. But its highest use is in its beauty after all, and this prepares the way for the chapter that follows. But we must here, in the list of utilities, class the village green, the smooth, bright, and springy cricket-ground, and the close-shaven lawn, where the children play ; for the sun- shine of life should be reflected on the verdure of Nature, in a world where there are so many cheap sources of physical health and social happiness. These things follow of necessity, if we write down distinctly that the grass carpets the playground of the children, when they make the sky ring with their laughter, and the elastic turf rebound to the tramp of their tiny, lively feet. The very ground is blessed where children tread is blessed already by its own greenness, and sprinklings of gold and silver, it is doubly-blessed, when children make their sport upon it, and ignore all laws and all history in wild abandonment to the impulses of nature. God bless them ; and if a tear starts while we say so, it shall fall upon the grass that weeps a million better tears than these every-day breaks, for beauty, and simplicity, and truth. 14 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. " The sweet songs of the vineyards and the bees, Fell lullingly upon the soothed ear; And nightingales among the orange trees, Piping their gurgling notes so soft and clear, The old and the young came from the fields to hear Some gathered flowers hy the meadow side Of bright and beautiful there was no dearth Or picked up daisies, which they strove to hide, Then threw at each other, pay with mirth, Or planted garlands for the nymphs who loved them from their birth." LONGUS, PASTORAL, Shepherd'* Spring. V. THE BEAUTY OP IT. It seems as if nothing could be said under this head, because, in truth, there is so much to say. To get a good idea of the beauty of the grass, endeavour in imagination to form a picture of a world without it. It is precisely to the scenery of Nature what the Bible is to literature. You remember that in the dream, " Eclipse of Faith," that the Bible had been obliterated, and every other book had thereat lost its value, and literature was at an end ? Take away this green ground colour on which Dame Nature works her embroidery patterns, and where would be the picturesque scarlet poppies or white daisies, or the grey of the chalk cliffs, or the golden bloom of a wilder- ness of buttercups ? Its chief service to beauty is as the garment of the earth. It watches night and day at all seasons of the year, " in all places that the eye of heaven visits," for spots on which to pitch new tents, to make the desert less hideous, fill up the groundwork of the grandest pictures, and give the promise of plenty on the flowery meadows where it lifts its silvery and purple THE STORY OP A BLADK OP GRASS. 15 panicles breast-high, and mocks the sea in its rolling waves of spark] ..ng greenness. It is beautiful when it mixes with orpine and lurritis on the ruined bastion or grey garden-wall beautiful when it sprinkles the brown thatch with tufts that find sufficient nourishment, where green mosses have been before ; beautiful when it clothes the harsh upland, and gives nourishment to a thousand snow-white fleeces ; still more beautiful when it makes a little islet in a bright blue mountain lake, " a fortunate purple isle/' with its ruddy spikes of short-lived flowers; and precious as well as beautiful when it comes close beside us, in company with the sparrow and the robin, as a threshold visitant, to soften the footfall of care, and give a daily welcome to the world of greenness. " If a friend my grass-grown threshold find, O, how my lonely cot resounds with glee ! " Is it only for its velvet softness, and the round pillowy knolls it heaves up in the vistas of the greenwood, that the weary and the dreamer find it so sweet a place of rest ? or is it because the wild bee flits around its silvery panicles, and blows his bugle as he goes with a bounding heart to gather sweets ; that the hare and the rabbit burrow beneath its smooth sward ; that the dear lark cowers amid its sprays, and cherishes the children of his bosom under its brown matted roots; that the daisy, the cowslip, the daffodil, the orchises the fairies of the flower world the bird's-foot trefoil the golden fingered beauty of the meadows, the little yellow and the large strawberry trefoil, are all sheltered and cherished by it : and that when the brown-visaged mower rustic image IP BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. of the Last Enemy sweeps it down, it scents the air for miles with the sweetest perfume ever breathed by man ? If only for its fresh gr^en hue, let the dreamer love it, let him lie thereon " Vnder ye curtaine of ye greenwoode shade, Beside ye brooke VDOD ve velvet gras." GODFREY OP LOULOUGNE, B. x., s. 64. And if thou, O reader, hast any nobler hope imprisoned in t!.-y heart than that of cooking partridges, or measure- ing tape; if thou hast not exchanged the Druid's harp for bell-metal, nor suffered thy heroism to sink into hypocrisy, go out into the green wilderness, lie down upon the cushion of the grass, and pillow thy head upon its virgin beauty. Then shall the songs of the golden age be warbled in thine ear ; then shall the spirit of love sweep thy heart-strings, to awaken the melodies of the Empyrean within thee ; and a heritage of eternal beauty shall be thine, in the place of the fleshless fancies which now allure thee. Stay not here, creating dusty heavens, from which, like a wild beast, thou shall be thrust here- after, but go out free and glad, and commune with the grass, and listen to its stories of the ages. Look back at the past, and learn the lesson of its faded peoples and crumbled empires; learn the ephemeral fleetness of human things, and the grand supremacy of Nature. The temples of the Sun, where eastern multitudes knelt in worship, have sunk down into white and ghastly ruins, and the grasses wave over their broken sculptures. The mighty caves of India, where darkness and mystery aided in the fearful work of bloody superstitions, are n* THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 17 choked up with weeds and herbage. The stately columns of Athens are woven with ivy, and violets, and grasses. The Roman Forum is a cow-market ; the Tarpeian Rock a waste ; and the Palace of the Caesars a rope- walk I Rome herself, where is she ? She is "At once the grave, the city, and the wilderness; And where her wrecks, like shattered mountains, rise, The flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress The hones of Desolation's nakedness." SHELLEY It is the fate of all : the white stone obliterates the turf, but the stone crumbles, and its ashes nourish the vepy grass which it had crushed before. London, Paris, Boston, go the same way, and grasses will one day cluster round the monuments of their highest glory ! It is always in rich grassy places that the little springs and water runnels bubble up into the light, and start off on their journey of fertility, down in the dark dell of the old wood, where the huge roots of the trees are matted all over with green and golden mosses, which sometimes hang like green beards, and dip into the pebbly waters ; where the little squirrel finds a home, and the lizard and the shrew-mice burrow. There it is that, in rich circles of waving grass, the fresh sparkling waters bubble up with a gurgling sound, and go tinkling along under the shelving banks, kissing the willows, and chiming their soft songs as they jump over the clumps of timber. The little brooks always make their pathway where the grasses grow ; for the little brooks and the grasses love each other, and they creep along together plotting 18 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. how to bless the world. The harebell ami the purple loose-strife, the woodbine, and the meadow-sweet, may each peep up here and there, and get refreshing splashes as the waters leap over the stony ledges in their way, but the grass is the streamlet's favourite, and wherever the one is, there is the other to be found. Oh, what a sweet life hath this grass of ours ! his is the true Arca- dian transport ; the music of the rivulet, the soft bleating of the sheep, the drowsy hum of wild bees, the rich perfume of thymy knolls, and the shadowy beauties of " faerie land/' These are his food and pastime, and the bonny brook that wets his feet is his chosen companion. " The deep recesses of the grove he gained, Where in a plain defended by the wood, Crept through the matted grass a crystal flood, By which an alabaster fountain stood." CHAUCER. Here comes the summer, swift as the succession of night and day ; once more the sun will blind us with his golden beams, and the " clear heat upon herbs " will touch us with the sweet lassitude that makes a " shady covert 'gainst the hot season," with a cool mossy lawn to roll upon, the very perfection of listless happiness and abandoned heart-ease. Oh ! the bright, smooth bowling green, how its shines in its close shaven neatness of verdure, and what a fragrance is emitted from it on dewy summer evenings, when the foot gently bruises the green sprays, or the bowls make glaucous lines upon it 1 Oh ! the rippling summer meadows, where the mole,s have made hundreds of soft hillocks, that invite us to bury ourselves in the herbage, and rest our heads on pillows THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 19 of wild flowers. Oh ! breezy evenings, under orchard trees, where the grass makes a cushion on which the juicy pears may tumble unhurt ; and oh ! bright eyes, laughing cheeks, and lips made for kissing, how will you people the garden with angel faces, when the lawn has been rolled and swept, and every tint of earth and heaven has taken possession of the dazzling beds and borders. A garden without grass is no garden at all, but if there is not a single flower in it all the summer long, a patch of well-kept turf may do its share to make you happy, and entice you to the sunshine and the healthy air. If any one created object is to be selected as a fit subject for the application to it of the immortal lines with which Endymion opens, none so fit as the grass, which is emphatically, " a thing of beauty, and a joy for ever." VI. IT IS A FAVOURITE WITH THE POETS. Chaucer, the morning star of English poetry, makes allusions to green things in a way which always evidences a thorough acquaintance with them. His " Gras in the Grene Mead " is not the accidental utterance of a mere maker of verses, but of an observer and lover of Nature. This same remark applies with equal force to Spenser and Shakspere, who may be classed with Chaucer as of the "Pre-Raphaelite " school of poetic-word painting. Milton took more of an artist's and scholar's view of Nature than his great predecessors. His mind was not suffi- ciently of the Saxon order for a realistic view of Nature ; to him the rural had higher claims than the rustic, and we do not get such fresh breezes and vivid breadths of greenness from his natural scenes and images as from the c 2 EU BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. poets who were less severe in their recognition of the limits of the art. Falstaff "babbling o' green fields," is a subjective incident of priceless value, whether we adopt the view that he was muttering the 23rd Psalm, or that he was renewing, in the visions of his death-bed, the sports and pastimes of his youth. Transferring the incident to the poet himself, who bore some likeness to his own wondrous creation, how it suggests the scenery of the Avon, the musings of the boy, the earnest activity of that marvellous spirit which must find room for action, now in Sir Thomas Lucy's park, and anon in the wide empire of Nature and human life. Silently flows the river through its wall of willows, past its bright bays of white ranunculus, eddying round its little green islets, all unconscious of the fame it is to have hereafter in every language of the world, by association with a name which stands highest and brightest in all the records of the human race. The playground of the great poet was also his school, and by carrying in his marvellous mind the memories of the Avon, he was enabled to intermingle with his grand conceptions, pictures of natural scenes that stand all alone for their truth and beauty. The " verdant mead " is an expression that acquires a sickly hue beside Shakspere's " lush and lusty grass " the "smooth lawn" is an unattractive object when he presents his "grassy carpet;" and the speech of Lysander has the freshness of the scene it paints : * To-morrow night, when Phoehe doth behold Her silver visage in the watery glass, Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass."* .Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i., so. 1. THE STOEY OP A BLADE OF GRASS. 21 Agaxj, in the song of the fairy : " To wander everywhere Swifter than the moon's sphere : And I do serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green."* It was on the " green plot/'t too, that Quince and his companions held the rehearsals of their revels. It is in the allusion to Grass that the consolation which Gaunt offers to the banished Bolingbroke derives its cheeriug freshness and its sunny hope ; he tells him : " All places that the eye of Heaven visits Are, to a wise man, happy ports and havens. * * - * * Suppose Devouring pestilence hangs in our air, And thou art flying to a fresher clime. Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it, To lie that way thou go'st, not that thou com'st. Suppose the singing birds, musicians ; The grass whereon thou tread's t, the presence strew' 'd; The flowers, fair ladies, and thy steps, no more Than a delightful measure or a dance."J The most noble of Shakspere's songs are those which partake most of the rural character, and these embody choicer, fresher, quainter allusions to green things than the songs of any other poet, either ancient or modern, of this or other countries. Where shall we find anything which bears comparison * Midsummer Night's Dream, Actii., sc. 1. t Midsummer Night's Dream, Act iii., sc. 1. { King Eichard II., Act. i., sc. 3 22 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. with the magical scenery of the Midsummer Nights Dream, and the Tempest ? Chaucer and Spenser are the only authors who dare be mentioned at such a moment. In his "nodding violets" and " kissing cherries," his " green holly " and " strawberries " which " grow under- neath," or in such passages as : " The even mead that erst brought forth The peckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover." Or that finest of wood songs in the English language, which the wild Caliban, in his rugged simplicity, babbles as if it were no better than mere drunken talk : " I pr'ythee let me bring thee where crabs grow ; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts; Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmozet ; I'll bring thee To clustering filberds, and sometimes I'll get thee Young sea-mells from the rock." The dew-spread grass has furnished many charming images to the poets. One sees therein the tears of heaven ; another calls it manna ; all agree that a dew- drop is more than a watery globule. " So sweet a kiss the morning sun gives out To those fresh morning drops upon the rose.*" " Sip from herb the pearly tears Of morning dew, and after break their fast On greensward ground a cool and grateful taste."* A more delicious image still is that of Mickle, when he pictures the Spring as glistening with dew : * Love's Labour's Lost, Act iv., sc. 8. f Dryden's Virgil Georgics, B. iii. THE STOTIY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 23 " Glistening with dew, the green-haired Spring Walks through the woods, and, smiling, in her train, Youth glitters gay on cherub wing, And life, exulting, lifts the eye to Heaven."* It comes to this, that if we want to know all that the poets have said about Grass, or even all that they have said directly in praise of it, we must read and note down, and gather together, and compare, and so this chapter must remain uncompleted; but whoever / chooses may proceed into it as a special department of the study of " Common Things." One reason why it is of necessity a favourite with the poets, gives us the subject for chapter VII. IT IS EMBLEMATIC. It is always of the same colour ; it changes its aspect with the seasons, but neither the frost of January nor the fire of June ever utterly extinguish its sempiternal ver- dure, therefore, it is the emblem of constancy; it is faithful to the brown earth that feeds it, to the blue sky that hangs above it like a tent, and at the horizon touches it, as if there the tent-pegs were driven into the ground. It is an emblem of life, the stature of its growth is limited and it clings closely to the earth ; the brightest of its blossoms are demure, as compared with things of less utility that share the sunshine with it ; and just as man, in the midst of stern utilities and material thoughts holds firmly to sources of heavenly knowledge, and cherishes the faith that gives him hope in heaven, so the grass shelters many a bright-faced daisy, because for- Mickle Ode 3. 2i BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. sooth, the daisy is always looking upward, as becomes an angel of the herbage. Dr. Cromwell, in his " Philosophy of a Future Life/* urges that there are grounds for concluding that plants are possessed of a principle closely akin to intelligence. I know not how far knowledge may lead us in this direction ; but I am sure if vegetation ever comes to be regarded as the depository of sentient powers, it will be pronounced first of all that grass can think. It is an emblem, too, of all that is good in life and hopeful in death. We cannot conceive of human happiness, except in connection with verdurous scenes ; we cannot conjure up a vision of our heavenly home, without lavishly clothing it with greenness. The truth is, that the story of the grass is the story of the world. Ere the creatures of the flood and field existed, the earth brought forth grass and herbs, so that when the earth should " bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creep- ing thing/' they should find sustenance and enjoyment ; and man, waking up from chaos at the will of the Omnipotent, should find himself in a home of greenness, with a soft carpet for his feet, a refreshing verdure to gladden his eye, and a living beauty to imbue his heart with holiness and peace. Well ! upon the green turf he worshipped his God at sunrise, and upon the grassy ground he slept at nightfall ; and when that greatest of his benedictions came a companion to make com- plete the sweetness of his hours it was on the green grass they walked together, singing hymns of joy, and mingling their affections with the happiness of th? creatures. THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 25 " Raised of grassy turf Their table was, and mossy seats had round." PARADISE LOST. The leafy bowers were their mansions of beauty, and the grass made green the pathway to their temple of love. All the philosophies and mythologies have had for their object the same end as that proposed by our own blessed Christian faith the restoration of man to the Eden he has lost the bringing together of the primal elements of his life and history. It is certainly humanly pardonable that men should seek of Nature that which is alone the gift of God ; and the cravings of the human mind, in striving to solve the problem of destiny, have about them the signs of a poetry which the world will not willingly let die. And what of that ancient metaphor, " a green old age ? " It must have its place here, though it must rest for its validity on the sanction of prescription, not on its obviousness, for less lively hues are the more evident figures of senility, though in truth a hearty old age is implied by it, an age rich in years and experience, but with faculties unclouded, and the ardour of youth so mellowed, that the sympathies are practical, and the im- pulses governed by wise judgments. How far back the phrase may be traced I know not; I can only think of " Dryden's Dedication of the Georgics," where he com- pares Yirgil and Horace, as to the respective excellences of the works they produced at successive periods of their lives. He says : " In the beginning of summer, the days are almost at a stand, with little variation of length or shortness, because at that time ttie diurnal motion of the 26 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. sun partakes more of a right line than a spiral. The same is the method of Nature in the frame of man. He seems at forty to be fully in his summer tropic: somewhat before and somewhat after, he finds in his soul but small increases or decays. From fifty to threescore the balance generally holds, even in our colder climates, for he loses not much infancy ; and judgment, which is the effect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford liim little more than the stubble of his own harvest; yet, if his constitution be healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigour ; and the gleanings of that Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage of Abiezer. I have called this somewhere by a bold meta- phor a green old age ; but Virgil has given me his authority for the figure : " Jam senior ; sed cruda Deo, viridisque senectus.* It was upon the grassy prairies of the olden time the untamed races chased the deer and boar; within the umbrage of primeval woods they learnt the first lessons of a simple creed, and upon altars of green herbs offered their first sacrifice. Nature was still educating the Man, lifting up his heart to heaven by the splendours of noon and sunset, and filling him with gratitude to the Author of all Good, by the promises of fertile fields, the exube- rance of fruitful jungles, and the enamelled poetry of wood and hill side. In after times, the grassy herbage was still dear to men, and upon the green floor of the wilderness they made their orisons to the morning star, and chanted their hosannahs to the rising sun, regarding the golden orb as THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 27 the visible emblem of the Eternal. The green grass was the first altar, and the brown forest with its roof of sky the first temple. The Druids walked in solemn proces- sion over the dewy sward of the forest, when, with shouts of joy and wild songs of gladness, they assembled to commemorate the egress of the ark. Then the caves were festooned with garlands; an altar was built of grasses and vine leaves ; the crystal cups of honey were twined with clusters of wild blossoms ; the trees were festooned with flowers ; and citterns, emblematical of the sun-god, were hung among the garlands. Then in the twilight recesses the priests performed the mystic dance, and as the May smile of morning broke upon the hills and fields, the hymns of the May-women were whispered in wild melodies, and the invocation to May was per- formed upon the green. The cattle lowed in the meadows, the birds sang in the valleys, and the sun, pillowed on the clouds of heaven, flushed the fountains and the forests with his golden fire. The multitude fell prostrate on the grass. The priests bowed to the pavilion of celestial glory ; and with one accord the throngs of worshippers broke forth into hymns of praise, so that solemn music and sweet odours were eminent in the rituals of the grassy temples of the ancient Britons.* When man, first waking up from rude barbarism, perceived the relations of the world without to the world within himself, he sought to embody the unshapen poetry of his heart in some form of simple beauty, and he took the grass as the first representative of the exuberance of nature. He made manifest his thankful- * Harrovian. 28 BEAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. ness for the fruits of the ground in offerings of the green grass which made beautiful his pathway through the world, and by the seeds of which his fields were sown with plenty. The period is of immense antiquity when the inhabitants of the sacred region of the Nile began first, from the vestal hearth, to sacrifice to the celestial gods, not myrrh, cassia, nor the first fruits of things mingled with the crocus of frankincense for afterwards, when wanting the necessities of life, those were offered with great labour and many tears, as libations to the god, "but grass, which as a certain soft wool of a prolific nature, they plucked with their hands." " They gathered the blades and the roots, and all the germs of this herb, and committed them to the flames, as a sacri- fice to the gods, to whom they paid immortal honour through fire/'* Hence, too, the patriarchs and poets of the olden times painted Damater, the mother of the gods the same that was Cu-bell, the chief goddess of the Chaldeans, the Cybele of the lonians, and the Ehoia of the Doric people as sitting amid green grass, and surrounded with fragrant flowers. On the oldest coins of Syria she sits beside the hive, with ears of corn in her hands, to denote the return of the seasons and their exuberance of fruits ; while at her feet the grasses grow and wave, to typify the seasonal renewals of green beauty on the earth. So, too, the benefactors of humanity were represented as surrounded with emblems of rural beauty, and as such, Saturn, the man of piety and justice, is described with the sickle in hand, going over the earth to teach its people the tillage of the soil. It was in the * Porphyria de Abttinentia. Book II., sec. 5. THE STORY OP A BLADE OP GRASS. 29 season of spring grass, too, that the band of heroes under Jason set out under the guidance of the dove, which was directed by the hand of Minerva, to regain the Golden Fleece. It was at the time " When first the pleasing Pleiades appear, And grass-green meads pronounced the summer near, Of chiefs a valiant hand, the flower of Greece, Had planned the emprise of the golden fleece." But leaving the shadowy records and traditions of buried years, let us turn to the aspect of the grass itself, for it is everywhere a thing of beauty, whether gladden- ing the mountain solitude with its angel smile, greening the soft slopes of the mossy glades, where the red deer wanders, and the child loves to play ; whether gliding down into the deep, deep valleys, where the fountains murmur and the bees sing ; whether clothing the sharp granite on the crown of the world, and making a cushion for the only flower which there looks up to God, or clinging, like an eternal friendship, to the roots of the gnarled trees, where in summer the rabbits burrow and the linnets sing, and in winter the storm-cloud gathers and the branches crash ; while the hurricanes howl in chorus, scattering the growths of ages as they sweep the march of God. In all its states and stages it is emblematic of human sentiments and human fate ; especially is it emblematic both of life and death. All imagery fades into common place beside the imagery of the inspired volume ; and there the grass is again and again the subject of similes and comparisons that reach deeper into the heart than it 30 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. is possible for the highest secular poetry to do. How sweet is the opening of the song of Moses in the 32nd of Deuteronomy "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass : because I will publish the name of the Lord." See the mournfulness of the climax in that reply to Hezekiah's prayer against the mocker Sennacherib, who had ravaged Israel " Their inhabitants were of small power, they were dismayed and confounded ; they were as the grass of the field, and as the green herb, as the grass on the housetops, and as corn blasted before it be grown up/' 2 Kings xix. 26. There are more than forty such comparisons of the fate of man to the grass of the field, and each has its own peculiar power, adaptation, and use, in the precious words of divine wisdom, and serve to bind closer the relationship of man and Nature, which are so distinctly set forth in the grand revelation, that all that is of earth shall perish, even as the grass of the field, " which to day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven." If we dare not say that the grass is a symbol of God, we may say that in some measure its perennial verdure and plentifulness, and as the source of sustenance to myriads of creatures, represents the exhaustless affluence, the limitless energy, the boundless supervision and incessant exodus of benefits that com- bine in Him, " by whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things." It is most true, says Isaac Taylor, that the pious contemplatist finds in the sere herbage of the wilderness, and on the rugged and scorched surface of granite rocks, symbols enough of God ; and he thinks THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 81 himself richly furnished with book, and lesson, and teacher, when he descries on his solitary way only a blade of grass. VIII. PERORATUS. It is worth noting here that, according to the teach- ings of Geology, the tribe of grasses was ushered into being only a short time previous to the appearance of man upon the earth. There are no grasses in the old red sandstone, none in the carboniferous rocks, rich as they are in other vegetable forms which gave their bulk to the formation of the coal measures. Myriads of ages went by, and myriads of plants succeeded race upon race, but not a grass was fashioned until of the entombed gene- rations, as we find them, " God had made the pile com- plete." Then, and not till then, when the earth was to be the abode of man and the creatures that especially minister to his wants, God said, "let the earth bring forth grass " and the black vallies became savannahs the dreary plains prairies of grasses and wild flowers. The grasses were made especially for man, and that is man's title to draw from them sustenance for both body and mind. Hence the moral beauty of green things generally, best perceived through the aid of a healthy sentiment, and a mind ordered after the will of God. Dear to man are they as things which solace him and beguile life of its harshness ; which surround his home with poetry, and fill his heart with peace. How dreary would be the lot of man in a world where green things were not; with TJO green valleys dotted with homely sheep, no broad savannahs rustling a million golden 32 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. tassels in the wind ; no flowery meadows folding us in their grassy arms ; and no magic chain of love-like songs and bleatings, and tender associations, and soft stirrings of the heart, filling the soul with joy upon joy, till life itself becomes but as an hour of sunshine. There is a moral beauty and a teaching for the spirit in all the budding things of the green out-door world, which to the wise man afford inward satisfaction, and never fail to renew his hope. Their very frailness and evanescence hint of our short stay here, as their renewed growth with each return of spring symbolizes the spring season to which we shall awake in another world. The story of the fig-tree but emblems the condition of man : if he be without fruit he shall be accursed ; if he do naught for the service of men, he shall fall under the doom of the fig-tree which the Lord condemned. " He gafe ensarnple in His parsone, And we the wordes have alone, Like to the tre with leves greene Upon the which no fruit is seene." GOWER. Let him, while his outward deeds are fair and goodly to behold, cherish also the inward sympathies and high thoughts which tend to fruitfulness in the future ; and he shall then become as a tree whose harvests are equal to its spring promises; and the fruition of his heart shall endear him to his age and generation. "The greene leaves outward sheweth that the tree is not drie inwarde ; and the good workes oftenlie notifieth the in- warde heart secretlie."* Golden Boke, Letter 7. THE STORY OP A BLADE OP GTIASS. 83 Over the field where human blood has flowed, and thousands have fallen in the fight for freedom, the grass waves as greenly as before ; and where the martyrs sleep, it grows in rich luxuriance, to hide their blanched bones from the gazing of the world. They who sleep " Deep beneath the grass-grown soil, Far in the common field," will awake no more to the sunshine of this world, but meet the reward of the justice or the injustice of their fight beyond the grassy shores of this. And so the world revolves ; and on the spot whereon armies have assembled, where emperors have achieved territory and martial glory, where crowns have been lost and won, and thousands have sunk down unknelled to rise no more, the grass comes again with its refreshing verdure, glad- dening the husbandman with its assurances of plenty, cheering the heart by its spring light and whisperings of love, and surrounding the life of man with perfumed benedictions. These are the teachings of the grass, these the lessons of its verdurous beauty. It is alike the symbol of exuberance and the teacher of fate. In the wilderness it welcomes man to pitch his tent and become a peaceful sojourner; and, amid the ruins, it mocks him for his work : the city which he rears sinks into the dust, and " Desolation o'er the grass-grown street Expands her raven wings, and from the gate Where senates once the weal of nations plann'd Hisseth the slimy snake, through hoary weeds, That clasp the mouldering column."* * Akenside " Pleasures of Imagination, B. ii." D 34 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. But from that ruin shall other cities arise, and a nobler race of frank-browed men shall pass in the streets, and maidens fair walk on the green lawns to welcome in the morns of spring. There shall be flowery islands in the future, and the summerVshine shall fall on meadows green, on which the children of the future men shall play. The young birds shall carol from their leafy homes, as if the trees sang forth themselves, and the new generation shall have the dreams of the present all ful- filled. Heart ! be thou like the grass ; welcome man and woman with thy smile : be thou green in winter as in summer; assort thyself with brown bees, and homely things that bless the world, keeping thy blossom by thee to gild the pathway of the future. Thy days are as few as the grass; as the grass that groweth to-day, and to- morrow is cast into the oven. " For euen as the flower of the grasse shall he vanishe awaye. The sunne ryseh wyth heete, and the grasse widereth, and his flower falleth away, and the beautie of the fashion of it perish- eth."* Heart ! be thou like the grass fragrant, fair, gentle, and fertile in good works; for which God be thanked, for its beauties are beyond description, and iis uses beyond enumeration. Bible, KV.l. THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. ** ALL is silence silence deep ; Hark! what chanting faint and low! Leaves and flowers awake from sleep, Murmurs from the blossoms flow." HEKR FREILIGRATH. NOT alone is the spring-time the genesis of life ; it is also the genesis of joy, the soul's season of promise. Nature and Man come back again to childhood ; child- hood itself has lighter laughter ; infancy a fresher heart. Spring ! oh dear spring, with thy tender voice and holy tears, how do men bless thee for thy gifts of love i greener moss, greener grass, blinking sunshine, softer air, daffodils, buttercups, " As if the rainbows of the fresh mild spring Had blossomed where they felL" Buttercups, the freshest and the welcomest of all. But- tercups ! splashes from the wheels of the chariot of the sun, that haunt everv meadow, and roadside, and sunny bank, and with the white daisies, make the gold and silver of the fields, a gold and silver more precious than the dirt men dig from mines, because appealing to their highest faculties, mingling in the play of their senti- T> 9, 36 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. ments, and while glittering before the eye, filling the heart with the noblest emotions. Hail, beautiful Season of Buttercups ! thrice beautiful in thy timid gentleness, thy confiding innocence, and thy fulness of rich promise ! Welcome, fragrant season of slanting sunbeams, fresh birth-time of yellow flowers ! When the dear children go with hearts full of spring- time, and hopes yet in the unfolded bud, searching for the snow-flakes and the spangles, the daisies and the buttercups, which they think heaven has let fall as manna ; then, wearied with prattle, to loiter home, in twos and threes, laden with their flowery spoils, to lie and dream all night of worlds made of flowers, and people with yellow faces and white daisy eyes, and yellow hair, walking upon yellow ground, on which there is not room to tread without crushing the buttercups. Wel- come, bright birthday of flowers and song; soft season of verdurous freshness, bringing back the growth and glory of the world, and filling manhood's heart with dreams of boyhood, and the fairy pictures of the past ! Welcome, Season of Buttercups, and soft gales that kiss the cheek with coolness ! When the honeysuckle peeps in for the first time at the open window ; when we ven- ture out once more with heads uncovered, and watch the sparrows as they flutter round the ivy ; and, forgetting hawks and cats, imagine their life a more joyous one than our own ; when the hills come nearer to us with their fresh green flanks, and the wild wood warbles with a full heart's song ; when the bare branches wake from the night of winter to the morning of spring, to peep at the buttercups and blades of light green grass that THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. 37 cluster round their knees ; and then watching the amber bars of the east, as the old sun climbs the slopes of Heaven, so wink and blink in the glare of the sunlight, that tears start from their eyes, and form thousands of yellow drops which take root on every spray and twig, and form their summer coat of leaves. Beautiful, fresh season ! sanctified at thy shrine of flowers by all the little birds that woo and wed in the brown branches ; by all the new buds which break into emerald greenness ; by all the dreamy bees which sail singing after luscious honey ; by all the milch kine that breathe a " smell of dairy," and wallow, knee-deep in the new grass; and by every milkmaid whose cheek blushes with the rose of health, whose breath is ever like the meadowy breeze of June, and who " makes her hand hard with labour, and her cheek soft with pity/' Spring is the Season of Buttercups ; it is the season also of bursting buds and germinating seeds. First, we have troops of snow-drops and flame-like crocusses, varied here and there with the bright yellow of the winter aconite, and crowned with the iron leaves of the butcher's broom. Then come the pale primroses " that die unmarried," sprinkling the hedges with sulphur ; violets with breath as sweet as from an angel's mouth: " As if Nature's incense-pans had spilt, And shed the dews i' the air." Coltsfoot, the emblem of maternal care ; the rare whitlow grass, both white and yellow, so small that they seem like legacies from the fairies, who perished when Faith fled o8 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. from the people : white wood anemone, the spirit of the spring breezes ; the pilewort, and the celandine that Wordsworth loved. On the edges blue speedwells peep up in cloudy clusters ; the chickweed and the cuckoo Jlower show their silver petals; the daisies sprinkle the sward with millions of white starry eyes ; and the butter- cups wreathe and twine over the green mounds, the forest dimples, the grey stones, and the graves of fv former summer's beauty. And amid them all " The silver streams go singing in fine lines " ^plashing, trickling, washing banks of moss where hare- bells, yet unfolded, cluster ; creeping through reedy banks, where the water fowl learn maternal joys ; past grassy meadows that swell with fatness, and beneath broad, arching boughs, where a thousand wild birds con- gregate amid the leafy darkness : " The Winter with his grisly storms no longer durst abide, The pleasant grass with lusty green the earth hath newly dyed; The trees have leaves, the boughs do spread, new changed is the year, The water-brooks are clean sunk down, the pleasant boughs ap- pear; The Spring is come, the goodly nymphs nowdance in every place ; Thus hath the year most pleasantly of late changed her face." EARL SURREY. More glorious still when the gardens heap up their crim- son foam, and apple orchards brim over with blossoms ; when the green corn waves high above the furrows, playing with every wind that skips over the field, and clustering in thick patches round the skylark's nest, THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. 39 where the brooding mother crouches, listening to her gallant as he dashes upwards to the sun, singing in the blue his roundelay. In the hedges nestle all manner of wild herbs and creatures, while, along the banks, the hawthorns stretch, like boundary walls, for miles and miles, making the air so full of fragrance that we seem wafted to some old region of enchantment, amid the scenery of the " Fairy Queen/' or within reach of the " sleep soothing groves " of the " Castle of Indolence." Good old friend ! fling- ing its perfume over the sheep-fields, waving its boughs over the thatched roof, and suggesting to the wayfarer the merry days of Robin Hood, when the good folks went before daybreak to the woods " To gather May-buskets and smelling brere, ***** With hawthorn buds and sweet eglantine, And girlonds of roses, and soppes in wine." The Season of Buttercups is also the season of the sweet birds' song. It is the heyday of Nature, in which the blood trips more freshly through the veins of every creature, and love stoops down once more to possess all things with his warmth and vigour. How could the little birds woo and wed at any other time? How, except at the season of Buttercups ? when the world is surfeited with beauty, when ** Each leaf upon the tree doth shake with joy, With joy the white clouds navigate the blue, And on his painted wings the butterfly, Most splendid masker in this carnival, Floats through the air in joy." ALEXANDER SMITH. 40 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. How, but at that awakening season, when " The clodded earth goes up in sweet breathed flowers ; In music dies poor human speech, And into beauty blow these hearts of ours, Wh en love is born in each." ALEXANDER SMITH.. It is this passion, dawning in the Season of Buttercups, which gives new life to the heart of the most timid creature; works a change in the attitude and habit of the most courageous and the most retiring ; gives the quadruped his noblest bearing, and the bird his brightest plumage ; makes the creature, which before was startled at the falling of a leaf, or the dancing of its own shadow, energetic, affectionate, and fearless; brings out the highest capabilities of the meanest and most despised, and makes even a sparrow musical. There is the bonny lark, dweller on the brown earth, companion of the daisy, a little tawny bird, shy, and crouching in the dust Love lifts him up into the blue heavens to beat his wings against the morning star, and drown the voices of angels with his torrent of song : " Seeming to rain down music from his wings, And bathe his plumage in a fount of light." It carries him on the wings of a wild passion away into the abysses dim Of lornest space, in whose deeps regally Suns and their bright broods swim ;" and makes him the companion of the sunshine and the amber cloud, all the while warbling to his bride as she sits brooding and listening under the shelter of the bents. THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. 41 How fares it with a hundred others? Mute all the year till now, Love seizes them, and they become spirits of gay song, so full, free, and concordant, that the forest is no longer a mere fleet of brown stems, but " an or- chestra of mighty sound." In the very dawn of spring comes the wryneck, with its cry of " pee," softer and fuller now, because uttered f rom the heart, telling of the hours, when " The balm, the beauty, and the bloom Recall the good Creator to his creature." Then, simultaneously, the chaffinch, who had begun to sing long before, attains the fulness and fluency of his cheerful song ; the thrush, who whistled when the snow lay thick, is hurried with the rest, and has so much to express that he is constrained to sing by night as well as by day ; the blackcap, with uncontrollable delight, mocks all the songs it hears, as if employing all the lan- guages of the bird-world to express what language never can express at all ; and, from the midst of this " full- throated chorus," rise the soft modulations of the nightin- gale, first, " jug jug/' then in a liquid strain of flute-like music which melts us into tears, as if it were the voice of a happy spirit, singing songs of gladness in the gardens of Paradise. "It breathes," says old Isaak Walton, " such sweet, loud music out of its little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind think that miracles had not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have often, the clear airs, the sweet descant, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of that sweet voice, might 42 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. well be lifted above the earth, and say, ' Lord what music hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music upon earth? '" No wonder the old poets wove it into their wild fables, and made it the emblem of tenderness, affection, and slighted worth. No wonder that Hesiod sang of the " dappled Philomel," Homer of the " tawny Nightingale," JDschylus, Sopho- cles, and Euripides himself the nightingale of Grecian poetry, drawing his inspirations from the beautiful in Nature Theocritus, dreamy and musical as a summer sleep Longus, spiritual and tender, like the flowers in the gardens of Philetas ; all that have known how to love and sing, from the mountain bard, charming the shepherds with impromptu songs, to Milton singing of " the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling bird, that now awake, Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song." And not those only that sing deserve honourable mention, but many others, whose throats have no ravishing har- monies, are yet susceptible of the rose-hues and summer breath of that blind god who tips his arrow with an amra bloom to make its point pierce keener. There is the little wagtail dear to the Season of Buttercups a consequential, striding wiseacre, for ever foraging by the unfrozen spring for delicate morsels of insect life; a thorough Briton, nevertheless, who sticks to the land that gave him birth, and disdains to turn his back on our northern climate, because a few fogs and frosts give edge to the British winter. There are the rooks, too, a THE SEASON OF BUTTERCUPS. 43 clamorous, croaking, sable-plumed race of petty swindlers, spending half the spring in stealing each other's sticks, and righting no end of battles in the thick of the branches, until that universal conqueror the god of the Season of Buttercups has them in his grasp, and then they build nests, and prattle of love, and hatch large broods of baby rooks destined, like their parents, to be alternately devils and doves the very models of parental care and social union. Besides these, there are the wood- pigeons, which now gather back to their old mossy haunts, cowering together in the leafiest of coverts, besides the loveliest of grey old nooks, where little runnels flow unseen, and little seeds burst into yellow sprays, under the matting of the last year's leaves, to spring up into waving heads of greenness, and sit in the shadow of the oaks, beguiled by the soft, heart-touching " coo, coo," which tells of love amid the branches. April bringing up the rear of spring visitants, gives us quails, turtle- doves, swifts, puffins, swallows, martins, arid lapwings ; and life in innumerable forms assumes its noblest aspect, warmed into new vigour with the expansion of the season, enhanced in its beauty by the development of increased provision for its support, and lifted half-way into the region of the unreal by that divine impulse which is the soul of living Nature, and which, while it adds heroic attributes alike to man and brute, conserves that succession of creatures to which all the provisions of Nature are attached as to one continuous thread. ' Poets, painters, and gossipers, have all dealt with spring as a season of beauty only, as a time of renewal and regeneration ; forgetting that it is the season also of 44 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. strife and terror, alternating between sunshine and storm, and, in some climates, the most to be dreaded for its ravages of wind and wave. The vernal equinox is not more strikingly marked here in its bright hues, its burst- ing of leaf-bud and flower-bud, its softness of sunshine, and its gush of song, than it is in other climes by its sweeping hurricanes, its sand-storms, and ice-storms, its crash of forests, and fall of avalanches for it is every- where the season of rapid change, and the summer of fruitage which follows it is but the ripening of the influ- ence, which, in its birth, had so many startling features. The spring of the world has its analogies in the spring of time ; for in the ages the seasons are repeated, and from the beginning to the end of creation, times, and seasons, and things, are counterparts of each other. Geology, astronomy, history, each have their spring- time, their Season of Buttercups. Far back into the , twilight of tradition, spring shows its mask of beauty, and its phase of many-coloured strife. The mountain- heights that crown the world were the growths of former springs of forces, as buttercups are now the growths of fair springs of sunshine. Entombed within the rocky ramparts are the ferns and flowers of that old season of renewal, and beside those very plants are the indelible traces of up-heaving forces, writhings, fusings, and con- tortions, by which the giant masses were blasted and flung about the world, played with, as the March hur- ricane now plays with the stray feather o a bird, or as the ocean, whirled in the equinox, plays with the froth that forms the crest of its waves. Spring in the world and spring in man are only different sides of the same THE SEASON OP BUTTERCUPS. 45 fact. Infancy opens into youth, like the unfolding of a flower. All is promise ; the blossom of life breaks upon the ruddy cheek ; the freshness of spring-life is there ; the laughing lip and the daisy light of boyhood's eye proclaim how lovely is the stormless spring. But the equinox of life comes on, and fierce passions rage ; March hurricanes ride upon the breath ; March madness usurps the will ; the heart becomes a region of storm and tem- pest ; and sometimes the spring folly withers the blossom which should light up manhood's summer. It has its use, this spring of beauty in Nature, this spring of passion in Man. As the winds try the branches, and the frosts try the buds, sweeping away those that are not worthy to bear fruit, so the passions of Man servo as tests of the good that is in him. When they lead not to licentiousness, they impart a virtuous fire, which impels him to noble deeds, and upon the shoulders of impetuous youth, Love is borne in triumph to a home of virtue. Bless thee, bright season of greenness, birth- time of out-door joys, harbinger of plenty, genesis of love ; fresh, fragrant, and fertile season of Buttercups ! 46 A HAPPY FAMILY. WE are a cosy quiet couple, not frequently haunted by cares, or excited by varieties. We live just far enough from town to be free from temptations of pleasure, yet near enough to avoid lapsing into vapid dullness ; in fact, we manage to combine town and country life together in our little household, and to adorn our rustic pursuits with a few of the graces of literature, and some touches of homely art. I might perhaps amuse you by a relation of our every-day life, its whims and oddities and the utter abandonment to impulse to which, since our first wedding-day, we have been addicted ; but it is the family we have reared that I think I may most profitably talk about, and, at the risk of being thought egotistical, I shall give you a brief account of it. I venture to say that few strictly private families are so truly happy as ours; for though it comprises thousands of children of all ages, some older than ourselves, many of them differing in temper and taste as widely as the pole differs from the equator, yet the most perfect harmony at all times prevails amongst us, and the only anxiety that possesses us is to render each other happy. To be sure, the elements of " a row " are A HAPPY FAMILY. 47 never wanting ; and were the heads of the family for one single day to forget their responsibilities, bloodshed and cannibalism would make a total ruin of our model Agapemone. Ten or twelve may be considered a fair number for any ordinary family, and on such a limited scale, some little generalship is essential for the preservation of domestic peace : but, as I first remarked, our family consists of thousands in fact, we ourselves have never attempted a numbering of the people, and frankly confess we do not know how many within a thousand or two are dependent upon us. If I tell you they are all children of adoption, for as yet we are unblessed with children of our own, you will conjecture that we are keepers of an orphan asylum, a workhouse, or a prison ; but such ideas will vanish when I assure you that we are strictly private folk, renting a humble country cottage, with a moderate amount of garden attached, and with a very pretty variety of rural scenery adjoining. The fact is, we are victims of a hobby. How many have gone mad, been ruined, traduced, ay, transported or hanged, for hobbies ! Yet we live in no fear that our hobby will entail future penalties, for it is simply a love for animals : and the passion is fed and strengthened by a strong curiosity to learn more and more of their histories and instincts, their relations to each other and to the general scheme of nature, and, above all, their capabilities for human companionship. Our little house is a sort of menagerie ; not in imitation of the Zoolo- gical Gardens, or the Jardin des Plantes, nor yet on the plan of the Hospital for Animals at Surat, for we have 48 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. nothing about us that is obnoxious, and not a single cripple. We are just now ready for breakfast, and we sit at the fire surrounded with cockatoos, macaws, and parrots. All the voices of the animal world salute and deafen us. Old Poll, the pet of the parlour, can bark, growl, bleat, purr, or whistle, and in addition, ask for every thing she wants, and for many things she does not want. She can be insolent or polite ; and, as a result of our teaching, she is a very expert thief. I could tell a hundred anecdotes about that one patriarchal parrot : how she takes tea from a spoon and beer from a tumbler ; how she cracks nuts and crows like a cock ; how she leaves her cage to steal sugar or fruit ; how she can recite two complete stanzas of Johnny Gilpin, and bandy small talk with any body. When her noise and impudence cease, we turn to the cockatoos, of which we have three elegant, docile, loving creatures : one pure white, with a crest that looks like flakes of turbot ; another with pale sulphur crest; and a third with white and crimson plumage strictly a cockatoo-parrot, the most loquacious of the whole family, but so gentle in her demeanour that she never was guilty of a single mischief yet. To visitors, the gray and green parrots, of which we have two each, are a perfect bore ; they scream and yell and bark, and, if a chance were afforded them, would dig their pickaxe beaks into innocent faces and hands ; but these gentle crested favourites are determined to be loved, and at the first sound of a strange voice, up go their crests, down go their heads with a soft ejaculation of " Cock-a-too " and if they do not get their accustomed A HAPPY FAMILY. 49 scratching on the poll, they seem dejected for the day. As for Betty, the cockatoo parrot, she says plainly, " Scratch poor Betty's poll ; Betty wants her poll scratched;" and scratched it must be over and over again before Betty will turn to her bread and milk, and allow an interval for conversation. Then we have a pair of Australian ground parroquets ; two splendid macaws that dazzle the eye with their oriental plumes of azure and vermillion ; a pair of slender and brilliantly-coloured lories, that have never yet, and never will, acquire more speech than the utterance of their names ; and a pair of Brazilian toucans, with enormous bills, and plumage more dazzling than the dress of a harlequin. You would just think yourself in Babel, were you to be spiritually present when we sit down to breakfast surrounded by these, the noisiest members of our happy family. But if you were present in the body also, I would insure complete silence by one clap of the hand and you should hear a pin drop if you wished it. Then one by one each should go through its performances of imitating a farm-yard, a fiddle, a pair of bagpipes, or a series of incoherent but very comical speeches. Old Poll is the only one that would occasion trouble ; and she is so self-willed, that you would have to take your chance whether she would take breakfast with us and talk like a Christian, or cough, bark, and growl you into a state of stupid deafness. But if all went well, Polly would be a polyglot; for she can gabble French, German, and Latin with very tolerable accent, and mix with her classical quotations the more familiar sounds of " Beer, ho/ 7 " ~&*-7cer," and the words and air of " Pretty, 50 BRAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. pretty Polly Hopkins." When Betty's turn came, she would, in a nasal singing tone, ask you some impertinent questions, such as "Can you spell Istactepetzacuxochitl Icohueyo ?" and before you could give her an answer, such is her want of politeness, she would hurry through a whole string of small talk ; ask for tea, beer, cakes-, nuts, grapes, and finish off with Quin's "incoherent story," which, with a slight blush, I confess to have spent the occasional leisure of a whole year in teaching her. "While this went on, the other birds would get jealous ; and to keep peace, we should have to scratch no end of proffered polls, and make a compromise with master Tommy, the elder of the green parrots, by the present of a chicken bone for him to pick and chuckle over. The exhibition always finishes by feeding the toucans, which are the "lions" of the collection; we hand them each a choice morsel a task which you might think dangerous, seeing that their beaks are large enough for the seizure of a fat baby, and you would think it no trifling matter to appease appetites having such formidable representatives. Yet, immense as are the horny appendages with which the toucan takes his daily bread, his mode of eating is decidedly pretty and amusing. The food is taken on the point of the bill, it is then tossed high in the air, the immense jaws open like a pair of park-gates, and the descending morsel falls straight into the gullet with " a cluck " that makes one roar with laughter. The conjuror who catches knives nnd rings might take a lesson from these comical creatures. It is not every body who cares to be shut in with such A HAPPY FAMILY. 51 a gabbling noisy crew as our parrots ; and fortunately we can give our visitors a choice between fountains and water-gardens, tropical and British ferns, and homely songsters; or accommodate them with the scientific seclusion of a cabinet stocked with living and dead insects, aquatic larvae that glide about like ghosts, beetles that kick and plunge in their vessels of water like imps on the verge of despair, together with tame spiders, toads, frogs, and snakes, and a very attractive display of stuffed quadrupeds and birds, and some pre- pared and mounted skeletons of various animals. This cabinet-room is my own especial pleasure; cara sposa only finds her way there occasionally ; and, indeed, none but choice scientific friends, who have sufficient enthusiasm to stare themselves tired with a compound microscope, or feed their imaginations into a "fierce frenzy " by discussing the technologies of entomological nomencla- ture, ever get permission, much less invitations, to enter it. The most attractive things there are the Aquaria and water-cabinets, which together fill up the window- spaces, and shut out a large portion of the daylight. In the right-hand window stands the river-tank, pellucid as crystal, and luxuriant with many forms of bright- green vegetation. Within it five-and-thirty fishes glide and gambol, and exhibit their several habits and in- stincts. I should not mention this as a part of our happy family were it not so in reality. In that vessel more than three-fourths of the finny innocents are as tame as cats ; they know me, love me, and not only feed from my hand, but assemble when I call them, and obey my every look and motion as readily as if they were E I 52 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. terrestrial kith and kin. There are three splendid tench naturally the shyest of British fishes now so familiar with the prison which has housed them for more than two years, and the keeper who has tended them during that time, that they not only flounder out of the dark weeds and rise when I call them to receive a few worms, but, without the offer of food, they will assemble at the surface and remain still while I play with them, and seem to enjoy familiarities as much as parrots do to have their polls scratched. I have a whole school of Crucian, British, and Prus- sian carp, all docile and loving as is their nature; but one huge Prussian carp is the captain of the tank the special pet, the ancient and trusty friend whom I ever delight to honour. He is a magnificent fellow, plump, iridescent, seven inches in length, and as playful as a spaniel. He commands universal admiration. His easy, gliding, and dignified motions, for he is never in a hurry, and his constant association with seven other of his kindred, who to him are as babes to a giant, and above all, his confiding fondness, make him a piscatory marvel. Whenever I enter the room, " the boomer," or ''master carpenter," for those are the names he seve- rally bears, at once recognizes my voice or step, and straightway he comes "booming" to the side, with his dolphin-like head and splendid eyes, and there poises in mid-water to watch me. If I sit down to write, he remains there, slowly rising and sinking, never leaving the side next me even for an instant ; he seems to watch and listen; and I could sometimes bitterly reproach Nature that she does not allow him to speak. As to A HAPPY FAMILY. 53 eating from my hand, or rising to the top when called, or roiling on his side to be played with, these are common- place matters ; he will nibble my finger gently for ten minutes at a time, play with a stick, dart about at a game of touch, or assemble his little band of juvenile carpenters, and get up a frolic with them for my amuse- ment. But he is a gentleman in every thing easy, dignified, never put out ; and if a shoal of saucy bleak or daring minnows steal the choicest morsel even from his lips, he yields the point at once, takes no revenge, but looks with expectant eye to his protector for more. As to chub and bream and dace, I have as many as the tank will support, all of them thoroughly tame. The minnows arid bleak are " the fun of the fair," and the loach, the untameable savages that hold aloof from the general society, and, spite of every kindness, persist in leading a life of their own. Above the river-tank are the shelves containing my aquatic curiosities. There the ravenous water-beetles and their larvae, with other creatures of similar habits, plunge and kick in their crystal jars. Give them a njinnow, how they plunge their fangs into the palpitating flesh, consume their prey piecemeal without first killing it, dragging the viscera from the trembling creature, or boring into the gills while it yet struggles for life ! If now and then a death occurs in the tank, these carni- vorous gluttons have the carcase tossed to them to riddle and consume; but as this very seldom happens, they have to remain content with earth worms from the garden, which I find answer very well for every one of the flesh-eating aquatics. 54 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. In other jars I have specimens of the magnificent Hydrous piceous, the largest aquatic beetle found in Britain, and the most docile and harmless of the whole family ; boat-flies ; lovely specimens of Colymbetes, with jet-black backs and silver bellies; eccentric whirligigs, that emulate the dervishes in defying giddiness ; quaint species of water-scorpion ; and that most curious of all the smaller inhabitants of the streams, the diving spider, with its silken cocoons suspended beneath the surface. These occupy a whole shelf; and a curious sight it is to watch their various motions and proceedings as they dive, spin, kick, quarrel, or engage in comical courtships. But these are not the most prized among the minor members of my family. The shelf above them contains the rare treasures, though to the casual eye it exhibits nothing more than a row of crystalline jars filled with clear water and very emerald-green tufts of starry vege- tation. But here are my Nitella, my Vallisneria, my sorted species of Chara, Biccia, and Lemna; and if I want to observe the circulation of the sap in plants or the blood in animals, these jars supply suitable speci- mens, that under the penetrating eye of the microscope enable me to pierce at once to the most secret chambers of nature to the fountain-head (materially speaking) of life itself, wherein I may observe the development of a cell, or the production of the primal germ of organiza- tion. Some honoured members of my family are here, too. I have thousands of the living ghosts of gnats, dragon-flies, and beetles, that glide up and down in the clear lymph, like souls just taking shape, and witn out one film of earth about them. Here, too, are small A HAPPY FAMILY. 55 larvae of all kinds, some ravenous as wolves, some that do nothing but jerk themselves into spasms, others that wriggle and twist into all manner of inconceivable forms. Here is a cluster of perhaps a thousand of the larvae of the common gnat, a lot of lively jerking imps, that seem as if their bodies were made of spiral springs, and that conduct themselves as if life had but two pleasures to sweeten it- one skipping like Spring-heeled Jack, the other hanging from the ceiling by the tail, as the American adventurer lately astonished us by his anti- podean perambulations. Indeed, all the aquatic larvae that I have here numbering some sixty different kinds are given to this same feat of suspending themselves by the tail from the surface of the water; for in that way only do they breathe, by means of the plumes, and rays, and prongs with which their tails are furnished. In other jars I have some pretty water-mites that are incessantly on the trot, not swimming or diving, but literally running hither and thither, as if at any depth and any where the water presented to their feet a solid surface. 1 have thousands of Cyclops, Monads, Yorti- cellas, wheel-animalcules, a few Hydras, and no end of common and rare infusoria, that nightly occupy me under the glare of the microscope-lamp, in exploring their inner and outer constructions, their actions and instincts, and the many marvellous indications they afford of the perfection of the economies in things ordi- narily invisible the work of the same Hand from which the worlds themselves were launched, and which sus- tains, without ceasing, the balance of huge incomprehen- sible forces. 56 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. My other window is adorned with a marine collection similar^ arranged. The tank contains the choicest of the gorgeous sea-flowers " Blossoms that ope in the oozy deep, And ne'er lure the bee to their green retreat." I have all the well-known anemones, and a goodly number of new and rare species. Some are like daisies, others like the bundles of hissing snakes the ancients wove around the heads of furies ; one kind is an exact imitation of a rosette of blue ribbons, another of a coral- coloured chrysanthemum ; but the most prized of all for glorious form and colour is the huge carnation or plumed anemone, which expands its thousands of living fringes into the form of a very fabulous carnation of mammoth dimensions. These are ever changing in form and aspect ; now they are lifeless lumps of jelly, now alabaster columns, now transparent balloons puffed to bursting with absorbed water, and again the flowery form predominates, thousands of petal-like fingers expand; and the sea-bottom, transferred to my room, shows me its floral gems, that rival those of the garden in splen- dour, but which move and change mysteriously, and show themselves to be endowed with a mute but wonderful life. Lifeless as they may appear for hours, their will at last determines them to prove that they can glide and climb, and float and cling ; aye, and grasp in an embrace of death whatever livelier creature may unwarily come within reach of their barbed threads and flower-like lingers. Besides these, I have the pretty Serpulas, that make A HAPPY FAMILY. 57 for themselves stony tubes ; Madrepores, that build up ocean reefs, and that here in the glass vessel are posi- tively manufacturing coral before my eyes ; some crabs, that walk sideways on tiptoe, and that carry their eyes on stalks ; and hundreds of other things, of which it would require huge volumes to recount the history or do justice to their beauty, and the intense interest they excite in those who delight in preserving them as objects of study. After all, I think you would perhaps find more to amuse you in a little singing-party, to which we have assigned a room upstairs. This is the special care of my better half, who, indeed, shuts me out from any partici- pation in its anxieties, though I am very freely admitted to the performances of the pupils. In a snug attic, well lighted, adorned with a fountain and mirrors, the windows and skylights embellished with gay plants, a collection of about forty song-birds pass their time in as jolly a way as one would wish. You will think of happy couples and nest-building, and the ma- ternal incubation of baby-broods of dickey-birds ; but we long ago found out, as did Mr. Kidd, the prince of bird- masters, that a bird-room is not the place for breeding. If love sanctifies life, and gives it its noblest develop- ment, it also is the parent of strife and jealousy ; it ruined Troy, its dark side blots with some vengeance or madness or villany every page of the world's history; and how should a community of such warm-hearted creatures as birds escape the desolating effects of a fire that warms when kept in check by wisdom, but which scorches and blights when passion only fans the flame? Nat to philosophize, 58 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. suffice it that none of the fair sex are ever permitted to co- lonise here ; we have in other parts of the house a goodly number of happy feathered couples that enjoy connubial bliss and connubial cares ; but in a general assemblage hen-birds are but a source of contention and bickering. But what a merry and familiar lot are these bachelor vocalists ! how they " Ring roof and rafter, With bagpipes and reeling," from the first dawn of day to evening dusk, and even after that for hours, if indulged with a lighted lamp ! They are all familiar, too ; they cluster round their mis- tress when they have their daily supply of buns and insects and seeds and paste ; they swarm on her head and shoulders, and actually chaff at her in impudent tones and gestures, and make such a nutter, and con- fusion and row as would drive a nervous person utterly mad. There are siskins, canaries, white-throats, tits, woodlarks, wagtails, buntings, linnets, goldfinches, red- poles, a young thrush, a pair of Java sparrows ; a common sparrow, that has learned a few notes of respectable music, and that delights in quarrelling with everybody about nothing ; a couple of black-caps, a nightingale, and a most musical brambling, that imitates the note of every other bird, and almost equals the nightingale in some of his finest passages. The garden is as much a menagerie as the house. I have my triangular Cochins and my squatty Braraapoo- tras, my noble crested Polands and my neat little Sebrights, that look like poultry for a doll's house, A HAPPY FAMILY. 59 besides a herd of tame jays and jackdaws, that drive me crazy by their destructive tricks. These would not in- terest you, for you see such things everywhere; but here is a flock of mountain goats that make a daily bleating on the adjoining common ; they are pure Angoras, with silky fringes of milk-white hair hanging from their flanks to their fetlocks, and beards that would not disgrace the most hirsute Crimean hero that ever voted razors to be ridiculous. The father of the flock is a noble fellow such horns, such a curly head and massive forehead, such a delicate splash of fawn on his withers, and, O, the purity of his snow-white back and silky flanks 1 He hears my voice or footstep ; and away flies Billy, clearing the five-feet fence at a bound, and trotting towards me with a playful air of defiance, and with an evident con- sciousness of his capability to represent a traditional dilemma. As soon as he comes within a few paces, he draws himself up on the very tips of his toes, then leaps up and curvets sideways, and finally springs forward at me, and butts full at my chest in a manner that would alarm a stranger unprepared for defence. But that is only Billy's mode of romping with me it is always a rough kind of play ; but the noble-hearted fellow always takes care that his frontal sinus, not his crescented cornua, shall make the bold contact that, were I not prepared for it, would make me measure my length at his feet kors- de-combat. His pranks are all of them characteristic; he will leap up and plant his hoofs on my chest, and explore with his nose every one of my pockets to find a hidden bunch of acorns or a few bean-pods, all the while winking his splendid large eyes close to my face in a look CO BUAMBLES AND BAY LEAVKS. of intelligence that is as eloquent to me as the richest How of human speech. If I move aside, he will mount my back, plant his paws on my shoulders, and continue prancing up and down, and throwing his enormous weight upon me till I yield the point he seeks, and give him a choice morsel. What he will eat in this way is prodi- gious ; yet the fare he seeks when turned out on the common is the dry and sapless leaf, the thorny sprouts of the whin or the hawthorn, half-withered elm-leaves, and, indeed, anything that appears dry, tasteless, woody, and indigestible. It is a fact but little known, that goats never drink ; this, coupled with their love of dry, scrubby forage, enables them to crop fatness from bald granite, and completes their adaptableness to barren mountain, heights. If I am bitten with any of that enthusiasm which is popularly called "a fancy," it is certainly a fancy for goats. I have kept goats of every known variety, from the sleepy and fertile Spaniard, to the bold and sprightly Welshman, or the real chamois of the Alps. After all, 1 prefer these picturesque Angoras ; they are the goats for the artist every attitude is graceful, every line, from the beautifully shaped head to the clean fetlocks and polished hoofs, is suggestive of sylvan solitudes and rocky heights. Of all the domestic creatures that asso- ciate with man in the conquest of the earth, the goat is certainly the most ancient and classical. The earliest records of civilisation mention goats and sheep as repre- sentatives of pastoral wealth, and the most cherished property of the simple nomad patriarch ; whose flocks Mere his household gods, his daily and nightly care, and A HAPPY FAMILY. 61 his whole support during his bold migrations over path- less wilds. His great anxiety was to find a succession of " fresh fields and pastures new ;" and the sheep and goats were the real founders of the earliest states and dynasties. In the records of later ages the shepherd has ever a high place. And though in the old chivalric nar- ratives the horse is the subject of many a splendid apos- trophe, the domestic life of antiquity finds its truest utterance in the associations that attach to flocks and herds; for the shepherd was always the predecessor of the husbandman, or the builder of cities. The earliest and the latest pastoral equally derive freshness from the presence of the mountain goat. Longus, the first and most tender writer of pastorals, reaches his highest ex- cellence where he paints the foundlings, Daphnis and Chloe, feeding their flocks together, and at the same time learning to love. Theocritus, the true cottage-poet of antiquity, gives us the most homely and rustic pictures ever sketched in pastoral verse ; and in every group he places the goat in the foreground to suggest the flowery hills and knolls of wild thyme, amongst which his shep- herds breathe fragrant air in the tendance of their flocks. Horace, thoroughly proud of his garden, was too much of a parlour-poet, and too much addicted to the shadow of Mecsenas, to cultivate the truly rustic. But see what Virgil did in his highly polished pastorals and the graphic " Georgics " in honour of the jaunty, self-willed, strong-limbed, but tameable and affectionate Capricornus ; and when John Keats shook the dust of the grave from the inner life of Greece, and rekindled the flame on the altar of Pagan worship, the shadowy pomp of 02 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. Hellenic mythology received its finest finishing touches in his hands through the help of the sheep, and goats, and bees, that bleated and buzzed in the brightest of his sublime pictures. Then the goat was intimately mixed up with the origin of the drama : for tragedy, which was at first called trvgcfdia, or " the song of the cask," came to be known as trag&dia, or " the song of the goat," the cask of wine giving place to the higher prize of a goat in the public festivals. Are you fond of bees ? Here I have them in a house to themselves, aspect south-east, a causeway cut for them through the belt of shrubs that screens them from the July sun, along which they pass in buzzing streams to the bramble-hedges and clover-fields, that divide and splash the landscape round. I am passionately fond of my bees. Many a dreamy hour of joy do I find in sitting beside them on a summer afternoon, to watch them go and come, to note the several labours on which they are engaged, every one of which I can determine as well as a master who keeps a rigid register of the labours of his workmen. Some of my hives are made of glass, some of wood, or straw, with glass windows ; and in times of commotion, when the bees insist on non-interference, I can retire to the rear of my hive-board, and watch all that takes place within the several abodes of concord and industry. You will not doubt the difficulty I have in determining the exact number of the members of my family, if I tell you that my hive-board now contains ten strong stocks, every stock numbering not less than fifteen thousand bees some, indeed, containing as many as five-and-twenty or thirty thousand, as 1 could A HAPPY FAMILY. 63 prove by experiment. Keaumur first hit upon a mode of counting bees : he weighed a swarm ; the result was four pounds. Now a pound of bees contains five thou- sand individuals, and as many as half-a-dozen pounds of bees is the common weight of a strong and prosperous stock. Hence, if I tell you that nearly half a million hard-working folks recognise and love me as a father, you will at least allow I am a true paterfamilias, and in that sense, more worthy than even old Priam of Troy, who, I think, was the father of only fifty children. Of course I read the " Georgics " of Virgil, and make many a brown study over Columella, and Schirach, and Reaumur, and Huber, and Cotton ; nor do I forget old Tupper, who has a grand place in my library no, nor "Wildman, nor Nutt, nor Taylor, nor any other true student of this wonderful insect. Here, indeed, I can verify with my own hands and eyes many of the most startling discoveries that have been made as to the habits and instincts of the bee, and become daily familiar with facts that the majority of those who only read about them must regard as extravagant fictions. I see the queen, surrounded by her state attendants, every one of which right loyally faces the supreme female magistrate and mother of the state : never one of that dutiful train turning its back even for an instant to the royal mistress, who represents all, and more than can be imagined, of dignity and command concentrated into the compass of Jess than an inch. I see the progress and development of new broods, the deadly hate of rival queens, when it happens that two come into contact. As two claimants to a throne cause civil war in human states, so with the 64 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. bees, that in every thing represent the serious side of human life in all its minutiae with wonderful accuracy. But the bees are the wisest ; they never suffer the com- munity to waste valuable energies in deciding a personal quarrel. They urge the rivals to single combat, and recognise the victor as their future mistress ; the dead body of the vanquished being cast out from the city. There is no end to the marvellous in the history of the bee ; and the studious possessor of them may have daily proof that neither classic lore nor modern scientific research has yet exhausted the catalogue of sober facts which in bee-history are every one too marvellous for credence, except to those who claim the bee as a member of the family. That they know and love their keeper, and submit cheerfully to his decrees, repelling the invad- ing stranger from their causeway and neighbourhood, is the crowning mark of their sagacity, humble as they are in the scale of nature, and the trait that endears them to me more than any other; for I can safely say, "My bees know me," and give proof of it to any who shall choose to challenge their capability for distinguishing one man from another. My catalogue does not end here. Oh no ! but it is time to stop, waiting till, on a future occasion, some fur- ther particulars may be given from the Family Register. Suffice it for the present that ours is a happy family, the members of it, though various in tastes and appetites, are knit in strong household bonds, and are very dear to us for their confidence and affection, and the many lessons they daily teach iis of the ways and means of nature. Indeed, we lead a very merry life in the midst of so in- A HAPPY FAMILY. Go congruous an assemblage. We wake to the bleating of goats and the song of birds; we breakfast with our parrots about us like a family-party ; we dine, like royalty, to music; for then the parrots give place to some little golden-plumaged pets that glory in the clatter of knives and forks and dishes. Tea and supper are also musical meals ; for we train many of our birds to sing by lamplight. And we sleep very pleasantly with the odour of ash-tree fires pervading the house in winter ; and all the rest of the year fragrances of all kinds are wafted through the open windows from our little flowery garden, or from the miles and miles of haw- thorns and haycocks that stretch on all sides around us. 66 THE JOY OF A GARDEN. " A wilderness of flowers around us lying, Tangling our steps the hidden pathway throng ; Myrtles and vines bloom there above thee, sighing, As the wind wakes their fibres into song. * * * Life here is Eros, that hath ever been, The sigh of Death forgot, the shadow Time unseen." JOHN E. READE. O BLINDING sunshine and green coolness ! O fresh morning air and dew-powdered gossamers ! O wakeful colours and sleepy odours ! O shivering leaves and rustling bird's-wing ! O joyful dawn, with hum of voices ! and sultry noon, with dead stillness, silent, and oppressive ! mossy turf ! O sparkling fountain ! dark mould, that, out of thy dead heart, sendest up the joy of summer in flowers that nse like souls released from the sepulchre ! O emerald spring, crouch- ing in shyness ! O lusty summer, confronting the sun in thy bold strength and ardour ! fiery autumn, gathering the glories of all seasons to thyself, to swell the grandeur of thy flaming sacrifice ' and hoary winter, magician and destroyer, by whose touch the world is hushed to rest, and the grave of beauty gar- THE JOY OF A GARDEN. 67 uished with a robe of whiteness ! "Where, but in a garden, shall we see and hear, and press to our heart of hearts the precious wealth of a whole creation ? Where, but in a garden, shall we meet with genuine heart-ease ? Where, but in a garden, learn the sweet idleness that seems like a dream of Eden ? Where, but in a garden, acquire the quick action and the anxious thought that prove us to be fallen creatures ? Where, but in a garden, realize our dependence upon God, and under- stand the links that bind us to Him ? Where else see the lilies " how they grow," and the sparrows that fall not but at His bidding ? Where, but in a garden, feel the full remembrance that man fell from God in the very morning of his creation, and thenceforth read reproaches in the thorns and thistles that choke the pathway of His life? Where, but in the world of greenness, and life, and everlasting change, and the growth on growth of things indissolubly linked together, read the true lesson of God's love for us, and see the upward yearning of all things that teach us we may be saved ? O heaven and earth ! in the garden is your meeting-place, for there God talked with Adam, and there the Saviour wept in agony for all. polar frost, and torrid sunshine ! O bright orient, and O mys- terious Occident, your delicatest darlings here blossom side by side, and shake their honey-bells together ; for a garden is a microcosm of the world, a living map of climes and seasons, a gathering of all things curious, and useful, and beautiful, from "the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth on the wall " and if it may be looked on as an open scroll of pictured emblems by F 2 G8 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. Almighty fingers, it also illustrates the parti-coloured structure of the human brain, which draws its know- ledge from far sources, and spreads abroad ten thousand busy hands to grope and gather from darkness many sources of light and power. moist palate ! longing for luscious fruits. dainty eye ! seeking festivals of colour. O heart ! panting for a lovely ministration, and expanding in the bliss of this hushed beauty, seek your joy in the garden, where the voice of God may still be heard among the trees, and a deep sense of peace shall possess thee. A garden is a Divine institution, a Biblical reminis- cence, a present solace, a refuge, a retreat. It is a joy all the year round, it keeps the mind active in invention, the hands diligent in labour, and the heart warm in its capabilities for love. It is the first hope of childhood, and age clings to it as an anchorage to earth, for in its presence it seems as if we could not die ; for we talk of " next summer," when Death is already clasping our hands in his ; and, as the chill of mortality freezes up the sources of life, the sight of a flower seems to dispel the darkness, and bring light and warmth from the very dust unto which we shall soon return. If I were to recount all that is comprised in the joy of a garden, I should have to sketch out a complete catalogue of human plea- sures, from that highest and first of all, the contempla- tions of the Deity as He is revealed in His word and His works, to the hopeful labour of an infant planting a garden for a doll. But, apart from things too high and reverend to be treated lightly, or things too trivial for a grown man to THE JOY OF A GARDEN. 69 try his pen upon, I think the first and chief pleasure of a garden is, that it compels one to be a gardener, which, of all wordly occupations, is the noblest, the most useful, and the one which promises the richest mental and material rewards. Compare the life and habits of a man who loves a garden to one who never in his life felt one touch of enthusiasm on the subject. Your gardener is a healthy, jovial fellow, with a hearty word for everybody ; when he laughs, you hear him, for he cannot simper ; when he greets you, it is with a grip of the hand that makes you feel, for he is incapable of a touch of finger- tips, or a slow squeeze of cold palms ; and it will be a rare thing if he does not live a " righteous, godly, and sober life," at peace with the world, and happy in the bosom of his family. A garden compels a man to be patient, diligent, and temperate there is no compromise possible. The day-break is no signal for a " second sleep," but a call to fresh air and exercise, for one day's neglect may cause the ruin of things that represent many months, perhaps years of anxious care and watchful attention. This out-door life not only keeps the blood in a healthy glow, and the brain acnv :n us search for knowledge, but the meanest tasks are elevated even to dignity by the fact of their necessity. Hence, a man who is a thorough gardener feels no shame in handling the spade, or in wheeling rubbish to the pit ; for though his means may enable him to enjoy all the refinements of life, it is his pride that there is not one manipulation but he can per- form himself, and so a brown skin and hard hands give him no fear that he shall lose his claim to the title of 70 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. gentleman. And the world is very forgiving on this matter its sympathies are with a gardener. Here it is that a striking social and political feature arises out of gardening that is, the levelling nature of it as a pursuit. In the presence of things for which men's sympathies are mutual, they forget distinctions of birth, and rank, and condition, and measure each other's worth only by their several degrees of skill; so that if Hodge adorns his fence with a new rose of his own raising, my Lord will drop all superfluous dig- nities, and discuss its merits with him as a neighbour and a friend. This genuine feeling of manly regard, mea- sured by worth only, ought to rob rivalry of every bitterness, and make even professional competitors glad of each other's successes ; that it does not do so is to be charged against the fickleness of human sympathies, and the natural sordidness of man's heart ; for gardening in itself suggests the purest ethics. It would, indeed, be a folly to say that bitterness never did creep into the minds of rival florists, but it is the exception, not the rule, for every grower knows that what one does, another can do, and to acknowledge merit is to pay homage to intellect, and patience, and vigilance, and instead of hating the man for his success, we learn to emulate his virtues ; so that rivalry in gardening is a school of practical morals, in which the pupils increase in excellence as they make progress in the successful prosecution of their favourite art. This truly fraternal feeling, to which every petty pride yields up the ghost, manifests itself in a thousand pleas- ing ways, which prove that gardening, whether followed THE JOY OF A GAEDEN. 71 as a livelihood or as a pleasure only, is an art that ennobles all who share in its exercise. Make note of a man who has attained to high excellence in any one department, and measuring him by the world's rule, you will not expect him to impart to you one jot of informa- tion which may help you to similar success. But, put the thing to experiment, and once let him see that the spirit of a true gardener moves you in questioning him, and he will lay before you his whole routine, will show you his compost, and tell you how it is prepared ; will tell you when and how to make your cuttings, let you into the secrets of stopping and training out, and put you in the way to beat him, if you can, with his own weapons. Look at our leading nurserymen, one and all, they do their best to help the amateur in his pleasing occupation ; the results of years of observation and experience are placed at the disposal of all to whom they may be useful, and they would be as incapable of any paltry exclusive- ness as they would be of paltry dealings and low chicanery. A spirit of generosity is a most distinctive feature in the character of a gardener ; he is perfectly miserable if he can find no one to accept a pinch of seed or a few cuttings of some choice thing ; to keep it to himself is as much agony as a boy endures when he sees no opening for the investment of his pocket money. Go through the whole catalogue of gifts, and what can equal flowers and fruits ? It is not only a diffusion of God's bounty, but a sacrifice to friendship of the most valued labour of our hands ; so that if we have toiled a whole season to produce a noble crop, we find 72 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. our highest pleasure in giving it away. You will find that the genuine gardener, who enters heart and soul into his work, has no selfish manner of enjoying the results of it ; he grows many a row of beans and peas, many a score bunches of grapes, many a dozen melons and cucumbers, expressly to give away ; and, if you were to watch him when he packs up the hamper for a friend, you would see that he chooses the best, and reserves those that are ill-shaped, badly-ripened, or in any way defective to the eye or palate, for himself. I believe I have given away a good third of all I have grown for many years past, and I do hope my heart will not so shrivel up that I shall ever cease to dig, sow, train, and reap expressly for those whom I esteem as dear to me, who have either no opportunity or no skill to produce garden products for themselves. A thousand anecdotes of the active nature of the generosity that grows up in a garden might be told here, and no end of historical events might be shown to have their chief interest in connection with such things. I shall never forget how Margaret Fuller describes her " first friend," as heightening the ideal beauty in which she floated before the child's imagination by her precious gifts of flowers. Here is one passage from her diary to the point : " She has just brought me a little bouquet. Her flowers have suffered greatly by my neglect, when I would be so engrossed by other things in her absence. But not to be disgusted or deterred, whenever she can glean one pretty enough, she brings it to me. Here is the bouquet a very delicate rose, with its half-blown bud, THE JOY OF A CAT5DEN. 73 heliotrope, geranium, lady-pea, heart's-ease all sweet- scented flowers ! Moved by their beauty, I wrote a short note, to which this is the reply. Just like her- self! " ' I should not love my flowers if they did not put forth all the strength they have, in gratitude for your preserving care last winter, and your wasted feelings over the unavoidable effects of the frost that came so unexpectedly to nip their blooming beauties/ " If the toils of a garden were not to be ranked among the highest pleasures of life, their reward would be found in the joy of giving away the fruits of our labours, for in this, above all things, the words of Holy Writ are lovingly verified, that " it is more blessed to give than to receive." Then look at the knowledge one gains in all this. The gardener must learn the exact limits of adaptability in the vegetable kingdom, so as to make plants of oppo- site habit and different constitution, natives of diverse climes, and naturally accustomed to soils of the most heterogeneous nature, prosper side by side in one com- mon soil and climate. He must learn how to subdue luxuriance in one, and promote it in another; how to hasten this plant into a state of rest, and how to prolong the growth of another beyond its natural season ; for it is by such coaxing, forcing, checking, and persuading, that we are enabled to adapt to our own peculiar seasons and temperature, so many interesting productions of the world ; and whether they come from the regions of everlasting snow, or from the burning jungles of the tropics ; whether from the cool clefts of alpine solitudes., 74 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. where nature waters them with the trickliugs of glaciers ; or from the dry lava of volcanic sites, where, perhaps, rain never falls, to compel them to shake hands as friends, and cease all disputes about the superiority of their native lands and seasons, in full content with the circum- stances with which the vigilant gardener has surrounded them. It is at this point that gardening rises to the dignity of an art. Let any one take a survey of one of the best modern gardens, in the height of the season, and say whether gardening should not be classed as one of the highest of the fine arts, for it paints not from life, but with life ; it models not after a form, but into endless forms of grace, and symmetry, and power, and it performs its best works by the aid of subjects that are foreign to our soil, our seasons, and even, in some cases, to the very sunshine under which they grow ; yet the gardener has so moulded their habit and altered their constitution, that they take to their conditions as if they were " to the manner born." Then, if we go a step higher, and consider how a few poor pelargoniums, dahlias, chrysanthemums, tulips, hyacinths, and other such things, which at their first introduction were not much more attractive than the commonest weeds, have, under the manipulations of the hybridizer, become the parents of thousands of varieties, to which every season makes additions of still better ones, we shall see that, in a secondary sense, the gardener is a creator as well as a modeller of beauty. Give him a thin, ragged, and almost colourless weed, and as soon as his sharp eye detects its capability for improvement, he marries it to some kindred flower, or to one of its own THE JOY OF A GARDEN. 75 family which may present desirable qualities ; the progeny will be one step in advance, and by steady repetition of the process, the plant will at last rise to the dignity of a florist's flower, its varieties will be counted by thousands, and glad eyes will gaze upon myriads of gorgeous blooms set out on the exhibition stage, little dreaming that the parent of all these variously coloured and diverse varieties was but a poor, slender, unnoticeable thing, which a passer-by would have spurned with his foot as " a weed" worthless of attention. What would the first dahlia, or the first half-dozen pelargoniums, or the first chrysan- themum now appear, if placed beside a few of the best of their progeny raised of late years ? And who, except for the proveable arid admitted nature of the fact, would believe that the thousands of different varieties, glowing in all the hues of the rainbow, and conforming to severe rules as to forms and properties, are the descendants of such unattractive things as were, for the most part, the parents of what are known as florists' flowers ? Nor can one fail to feel astonishment at the patience which has been shown in attaining such results. It may take twenty years to convert a " self," or one-coloured tulip, into a " feathered " flower, and it is seldom that they " break " in less than seven ; yet look at the collection of such a man as the late John Lawrence, or go over the ranunculuses of Tyso, or the chrysanthemums of Salter, or the pelargoniums of Turner and Henderson, and, remembering the original materials, it will be almost hard to believe that human agency alone has brought such results about. It might seem absurd to drop down from the consi- deration of these high departments of the art to the 76 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. humblest example, as seen in a cottage plot ; but the best joy of a garden is, that it levels all distinctions, and makes every sincere labourer, however mean under ordi- nary comparisons, alike meritorious. Look at the old Granny in her mobcap and gray gown : she is a picture of the past, worthy to live for ever on Frith's canvas, and call tears to the eyes of many in the future ; but see how, in spite of age, wrinkles, and indigence, a little of the poetry of youth clings about her dear old heart, in the love she bears her half-dozen flowers. She has known keen want, for her home is an almshouse ; she has lost all that were dear to her of kindred, and in her night- watches counts over the last words of her dear Betty, who died in childbed many, many years ago ; over her mantel-piece is the old-fashioned black paper profile of him who was her stay on earth, her friend, and com- panion, and to whom she gave herself with all her heart, in the freshness and fulness of life's first love. She looks on it as she sits smoothing her apron at her daily meals, and wonders whether God will call her to him " this winter," for her cough grows worse, and she thinks she cannot live through another ; and with all her weight of painful remembrances ; with all her bodily afflictions, age has not so chilled her feelings but that she loves her window pets as much as ever. Her geraniums are no one knows how many years old, their stems knotty and dark, and you would think, if you were to see them in January, that all life had -departed out of them. But Granny knows to a day when they will begin to break again, and she goes out into the road on the first sunny spring-day, and gathers a little fresh soil in a fire-shovel, THE JOY OF A GARDEN. 77 and dresses up their roots, and brings them into the light again, and gives them but little water at first, and this year they will grow as bravely as ever, filling the whole of her window with a leafy screen, and blooming to a certainty on Midsummer-day. Her heliotrope is just as old, and is grown like a shrub, and she says it always comes into bloom about Lammas-day, and she half believes that the boys make their oyster-shell grottoes on that day, in celebration of the opening of her sweet- scented flowers. God has not left her utterly desolate ; she can still read her large-print Bible, and, as long as she can keep on her feet, those precious flowers will sweeten her little room with their fragrance, and shed a soft light on her pathway to the grave. Look at her prying into the buds to see if any thing has come to hurt her darlings. Her white cap, and twinkling eye, and grey hair, make her beautiful as the sunlight glances on her, and one might believe her to be an angel tarrying for but an hour on this side of heaven, beguiled by the love of something so suggestive of her proper home and she is one. You can almost see the glory of a better world sinning on her brow as it did on the brow of Stephen. Her stay beside those flowers will not be long ; and otheis like them will beautify her grave. But who can tell the joy of a garden? Who but those who know, through sweet experience, can realize, either by remembrance or anticipation, the hearty fulness of life in which a gardener's happiness consists ? Take the year round, with all its lights and shadows, and what pursuit can offer so many joyous hopes, so many glad realizations, so many exquisite pleasures ! Look at the 78 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. dark, crumbly, fertile mould, how it rolls over from the spade, smelling rich and earthy, and showing a promise of plenty as it falls into friable powder in the ridges ! Look at the well-dressed border, when hoed over for the last time, ready for the seed that is to be committed to it; it is nothing to a passer-by, but its neat, swelling outline gives a pleasure to the gardener's eye that is not of the moment, but one of future promise ! Then, with what faith is the seed committed to the earth ; a few grains as fine as dust thrown by the skilful hand, and left to the care of the elements, in the full assurance that Nature will do her best to reward the husbandman ! Then there is the daily observation of the growth of things, whether they be the commonest kitchen crops, or the choicest flowering exotics, how we rejoice to see a bud break here, or a shoot start there, or, on a sudden, and as it were in a single night, a potted plant sends up from every joint its bold trusses that are to cover it with glory, and prove before the world that patience and skill spent on worthy objects, are sure to bring their good rewards. However refined may be the pleasures attendant on the culture of flowers, and the production of scenic effects in ornamental gardening, a few rows of well-grown edibles have special charms for most people. What can be more jolly in appearance than a well-stocked kitchen garden in autumn, when the potato ground has been cleared and planted, when many of the summer crops still linger to say " good bye," the bowery " runners " still holding their blooms, and weighing their sticks down with thou- sands of tender pods ; the kale, and broccoli, and winter THE JOY OF A GABDEN. 79 cabbages dressed up in their hearty green, like files of riflemen, full of strength, and suggestive of knife-and-fork battles before good fires, when the beef will have its right flavour, because honourably accompanied ? Peep into the shed or store-loft of the good gardener, and see the rosy-cheeked and russet apples stored away all shining with ripeness, and beating the sweetest flower-bed in their perfume ; the onions drying ready for the very goose that is waddling yonder ; the potatoes swelling their sacks tight, every tuber of them ready to transform itself into a snow-ball ; all reminding you of baked and roasted delicacies, that butter and pepper are to make additionally savoury on winter nights, or that at Christmas the grand feast of the year are to proclaim gardening to be the homeliest, the prettiest, and the most profitable of arts. Then, in early summer, what among gardening scenes more attractive than the rows of peas laden with snowy blossoms, like clouds of butterflies, or trying to topple their stakes over with their weight of plump pods, that make your mouth water as you involuntarily conjure up the smell of the mint that goes before them to the table, and the mingling of the green marrowy smoking things, with the brown gravy, that compels you to chuckle "delicious \" as the palate revels in their flavour ! See there, the pretty lettuces in their clean drills, so delicately green and vigorous; see the tender spring onions, silvery at the root, and ready for pulling ; the coral radishes; the cheerful small salads that seem to grow as you look at them, ah 1 of them hurrying towards the salad-bowl, crisp, and cool, and relishing, and ready to enchant the appetite on the very first warm day that 80 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. shall make a radish, or lettuce, or cucumber the very completion of table enjoyments. Then think of the beautiful gourds that always astonish you and everybody else, at their size and rapi- dity of growth, and that admit of half-a-dozen modes of cooking yet always delicious; the fresh summer cab- bages that take one leap from the morning dew to the bubbling pot; and, above all things, who can know the real flavour of peas but those who grow them within sight from the kitchen door, and who eat them an hour after the gathering ? You have only to tell a friend you will dine on such a day on peas "out of your own garden/' and he'll go any number of miles to taste your marrowy, bright green beauties, that have never been fermented in bushel baskets, or shaken out of flavour by the jolting of the market cart. Talk of high art and classic gardening, the sight of a row of well-grown kale, or a broad patch of kidney beans just coming into flower, or well-trained fruits on a south wall, swelling with luscious juices, and almost crying, "Eat me, eat me!" is one that cheers the heart of man, and appeals as strongly to the sympathies of a noble duke as to a ploughman in want of a dinner. The matrons say, "The way to a boy's heart is through his belly ;" but the adage applies to human kind of any age. These are very material con- siderations. "We do like to see something eatable in a garden ; and the man who makes a hobby of raising the best kinds of edibles, whether of the class of necessities or luxuries, adds to the productive power of his native land, increases the national resources, and in his day and generation does some good for the world. Who can THE JOY OF A GARDEN. 81 sneer at a cucumber with the bloom on, a fragrant mush- room hot from the gridiron, a basket of strawberries to dip in the breakfast cream, or even a dish of marrowy green kale with a savoury joint on a frosty day ? And there are higher pleasures, too, in this depart- ment of gardening. If our wits are not exercised in the arrangement of figures and colours to please the eye, o r our ingenuity taxed to acclimatize and bloom choice varieties, there is much to employ thought, and not a few pretty spectacles, as the seasons work their changes, now smothering the fruit trees with snowy bloom, and now loading their branches with the lovely fruit ; the very beet is pretty as its richly bronzed foliage meets from row to row ; and as to most crops in full luxuriance of growth, there is much real beauty in a well-disposed, aid well-kept profitable garden, the charms of which are much enhanced by the idea of utility that accompanies the enjoyment of them. One would not be in haste to condemn a poor cottager for striving to excel in the growth of flowers ; but there would be greater interest in his success if we saw that his cabbage and potato plots were not neglected, and that, in the aching of his heart for something beautiful, he did not forget the kale pot and the appetites of his little ones. Nor would the thriving citizen, who takes a pride in his beds of aspa- ragus, his trellises of tomatoes, and his creamy cauli- flowers, ever need to fear the criticism of his friends and neighbours, for that which is really useful has a dignity peculiar to itself, and makes its own assertion of its right to encouragement. Whoever turns his skill and patience to account in the creation of the material neces- G 82 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. sities and luxuries of life, finds a source of special enjoy- ment in the work, as well as a welcome addition to the family means, and, to some extent, adds to the resources of his country ; so that in profitable gardening a national end is served when personal and private benefits are aimed at only. To be sure, there are people who say that a kitchen garden is an expensive affair, for " the cabbages cost five shillings each " but whether it shall be a gain or a loss depends entirely on how it is managed. By right management, on either a small or large scale, the culture of edibles is immensely profitable, as everybody knows who is practically used to it ; but it is quite an easy matter for folks, who take no real inte- rest in a garden, or who have foggy notions of econo- mical tillage, to pay very dear indeed for their luxuries, and at last to get tired of the attempt to fill a basket at its market value. Depend upon it, it is no mean art that enables a man to take off potatoes at the rate of five tons to the rood, to gather a thousand cucumbers from one vine, and then strike cuttings, and go on again without the help of seed ; or to manage a succession of crops, so that there shall always be plenty and variety, and not a single waste leaf to cumber the ground. It is not a sordid feeling that stimulates a man to cultivate such things as shall increase the enjoyments of his family, and prove welcome as gifts to friends ; and the task of rearing handsome crops of eatables, each in perfection at its season, and some thrust out of their season, to gratify an honourable caprice, is one that has its rewards in many ways besides the profit; or, rather, the profit THE JOY OF A GARDEN. should be understood to include the pleasure attendant on the exercise of skill and industry, and the source of health that a garden always proves to a man who loves it. And this is equally true, whether a man be called to the hurry of commercial life in town, or be blest with country air and singing birds in the midst of farms and gardens. The subject invites one's heart as much as one's head, and the world is never more ready to pardon enthusiasm than when it is the sign and token of a love of out-of-door pleasures, and has for its end and aim the improvement of the social ties that bind the human family together. To enjoy a garden, a man must be a student of Nature, a good weather prophet, something of a botanist, very quick-sighted in matters of vegetable physiology, accus- tomed to observation, and that "forecasting of the whole," which Cowper notes as so essential to success. Those who dabble with little town plots, and never soar beyond paternal laurels and sweet-williams, have an idea that the gardener's season begins in May and ends in September ; but your genuine gardener finds as much to do, and as many pleasures in his work in the depth of winter as in the height of summer. I do not know but what the winter pleasures are the best, as they certainly are the most intellectual. Philosophers say that " anti- cipating " is a greater joy than " realizing " and when a man sits down to sketch out his scheme of culture for the next season, to plan his beds and arrange his planting, he has to exercise some very high faculties of mind. Perhaps he has done verbenas and geraniums, and lobelias, till he is sick of the repetitions, and now he r o U m 84 BRAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. means to work out a new style of bedding altogether. He looks over his stock, and by a strong effort of imagi- nation pictures out a plan, and sees it planted in its pro- per colours. Here, however, " is the rub," and the man of experience must be the man of invention ; for when his plans are all conceived, the colours marked, and the scheme completed, the thing has yet to be done in actual plants, and, strange to say, no gardener, however talented and rich in experience, can predict to a certainty how any scheme of bedding not before tried will answer. It must be done first, and judged on the ground; and hence the risking of a whole season, and perhaps thou- sands of plants, on an idea, is a bold adventure, and success proves a far-sighted sagacity. But consider the anxiety of the winter work where new patterns and styles are tried every year. Think of giving a man a bit of golden-leaved stonecrop, or a new variegated balm, or ground ivy, the gift being perhaps a mere scrap of an inch long, and what would you say if you were to see a hundred yards of it forming the most delicate edging to geometric beds next summer ? Yet this is just the sort of achievement in which an earnest gardener delights. Your scrap of something new or curious is made to root in heat; then the tender top nipped off and struck, and then the shoots, as fast as they appear, taken off and rooted again, till, in the course of a few months, your valued gift has been multiplied a thou- sand fold, and a simple sport of Nature, which an unob- servant eye would have passed unheeded, is, once secured in its entirety, converted into garden-stock, and the splendour of a grand show made perfect by it, THE JOY OP A GARDEN. 85 The vigilant gardener is always on the look-out for novelties and improvements. He observes an early pea come into blossom before any one in the row shows any signs of bloom. He does not look at it in idle wonder- ment, but at once secures it as a prize. He tears down the whole row, clears a space about it, gives it extra light, air, and nourishment, and ripens its pods a fort- night before any of the rest, and thus secures seed of an earlier sort, and lays the foundation of a fortune. But, apart from the daily work, apart from the season- changes and the calls for various operations consequent on the growth and decay of things, what a joy is a garden as a place of retreat from worldly cares, from anxieties and worry of all kinds ! There is our school of Nature, where we watch the first greening of the leaf, the growth of the full summer's verdure, and the slow but sure passage of autumn's " fiery hand " among the branches. There are the glittering constellations, and the soothing odours, that beguile one into the belief that God lets some fragments of heaven fall upon man's lot, that when he feels "of the earth, earthy," and the pressure of sordid musings, or the fever of worldly ambi- tions eats .up the heart, and threatens to crush every tender emotion out of it, he may, in the freshness of the inno- cent world of flowers, feel that life has its lovely compen- sations, and its rewards here ; and that the words of the Saviour appropriately answer his complaints " If God so clothe the grass of the field, how much more shall He clothe you, ye of little faith ! " Think of the morning walk, all coolness and fragrance ; think of the mid-day lounge under embracing branches, 86 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. where the mind sinks into sweetest dreams, and all ourpast readings of old lore, poetry, and Holy Writ take shapes, and float before us like realities ! Think of the mid-day summer glow of all things when the parterres burn with colour, and the cool green grass defies the sun to brown one ravel of its mossy carpet ; think of the " quiet cigar/' all alone in seraphic contemplation ; think of the in-door readings of the works of men who have loved gardens, from Bacon to Wordsworth, whose avenues of hollyhocks were the pride of Rydal ; think of the summer visits to the gardens of friends to make notes of comparison ; the trips to botanic gardens, not forgetting/afe* and exhibi- tions, where the genuine gardener has pleasures that the mere sight-seer knows nothing of; think of the pride with which you show your friends over your ground, and display your stock to those that have sympathies kindred with your own; and think of the fame you acquire in your circle as a clever gardener, a man of worth, a gentle- man, and a Christian, for you must be all these to love a garden rightly, and then say if there is any pursuit be- sides this that can match it in its fullness of joy, that can take its place for even one hour ; for it comprehends the love of Nature in its most extended meaning; it com- prehends the love of man in the reality of affectionate kindness, good-will, and sober behaviour ; and it com- prehends the love of God, in the daily witnessing of His works in their loveliest of aspects ! Who would not be a jolly gardener ? Who would not have at least some living flowery thing to set an earthly love upon ; who would not ever keep at least one flower near the heart, to cheer it in a gloomy hour, and read it an easily-learnt lesson THE JOY OP A GARDEN. 87 of love and duty to man and God ? Surely, without a garden, life is hardly possible ; with it all the foes of man may rise up against him, and he may turn aside for a moment and catch a glimpse of his roses through the open window, and say, " My peace is there, there will I seek God, my refuge/' 88 THE SOUL IN NATURE. THERE are certain philosophers who maintain that all existence is essentially material ; while there are others who hold, with equal stubbornness, that there are no entities but those of a spiritual kind. Not to-day only, but from the birthday of the world, have these two oppo- site doctrines been repeatedly brought into collision ; and the question, as far as philosophers are concerned, is as much unsolved as ever. But it is not always the philo- sopher who deals most acutely with philosophy ; and it sometimes happens that the idea of a poet, or the tradition of an uncultivated antiquity, throws more light on a topic under dispute than the most elaborate reasonings of men schooled in disputation. So it is in regard to this ques- tion of matter and spirit. The ancient poets, in their strange fables, asserted the prevalence of soul in Nature, and continually carried back the mind from material to spiritual things. The ancient creeds of the world embo- died the same thought ; and, whether we refer to the Indian, Egyptian, or Grecian mythologies, we find that a spiritual existence is everywhere granted, and that body and soul in man, body and soul in nature, are unities universally adopted as respectively essential to each THE SOUL IN NATURE. 89 other. The Hindoos say when B rah me sleeps, all existence passes away; but when Brahme wakes, his thoughts take shape under the agency of Brahma, and creation follows. What is Brahme but Deity, whose will controls Brahma or Nature, and through thought gives impulse to a perennial birth of beauty, each separate birth being the expression of that thought or will which called it into action? The Greeks had Proteus, who took many shapes, yet never lost his identity ; and Pro- teus was an impersonation of the creative power working underneath and continually revealing itself, never in two forms alike, yet ever the same in purport and essence. Proteus is Brahma at three removes, degraded somewhat by his passage through the Egyptian mythology, into which he passes with other gods from India, and so into the fanciful, but scarcely sublime category of Hellenic deities. Literatures, mythologies, traditions, all attest the union of matter and spirit; and instinct, turning a deaf ear to the propoundings of the spiritualist and the dogmas of the materialist, declares for the two elements, and holds them essential to each other. Science completes this work, and marries the two worlds together by the wedding-ring of universal law, which it is the task of science to comprehend and apply in accordance with the strictest generalities. Let it not be thought, however, that this work is yet complete for in the infancy of science we can only expect approximations; and such of these as physics are capable of affording, the labour of Oersted has thrown together in one of the most enchant- ing volumes ever published, which has attained a cos- 90 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. mopolitan celebrity, under the title of the "Soul in Nature." In this work, the great Danish philosopher employs the reasoning which scientific facts supply in the defence of that part of the popular faith which asserts the universal existence of spirit, or rather the universal prevalence of thought in Nature. As far as it is possible to reduce his views to the compass of a short essay, let us endeavour to do so, and with a hope that such a reduction of ample particulars into brief generalities will not, in any way, mar the profound reasonings of so genuine a philosopher. First, then, how do we gain a knowledge of the outer world ? Not surely by the senses only ; for in our quick views of things we apprehend their meaning readily by merely viewing portions of them, inferring the remainder of the conditions which are requisite to a complete appre- ciation of the object. We have a perfect idea of a tree, with branches, leaves, bark, buds, and fruit, from a mere glimpse of a portion of the trunk through a window or crevice ; and we recognize a book, as a book, by merely laying our hands on a portion of it in the dark. What then ? why ; inasmuch as we do not grasp the things themselves, but infer their existence by mere glimpses of them, so we are indebted for the knowledge of the world to the impressions which things are capable of producing upon us, such impressions being converted into thoughts by union with the collective experience with which former impressions have furnished us. Now, to make an impres- sion on a being capable of thought, requires in the object an active existence ; but a stone, lying still by the road- side, appears the deadest thing, the most immobile and THE SOUL IN NATURE. 91 passive existence it is possible to conceive ; and to assign it an active existence seems absurd. Yet that stone is dragged downwards by the force of gravitation ; it presses towards the centre of the earth, and meets with the resistance offered it by the stone on which it rests. That second stone is pressed upon by the first, and is also impelled downward by the force of gravitation, but is pre- vented from descending by other stones on which it is super-imposed ; while all of these again are in the same condition driven down by gravitation, yet prevented from descending further by the objects which support them. Again, the second stone, which bears the weight of the first, and the third stone bearing the weight of the second, are each subjected to the pressure of the body above them, and that pressure comparatively immea- surable though it is tends to compress the particles of the body pressed upon ; while the elasticity inherent in the particles of the body pressed upon, causes them to rebound, and so prevents them being crushed or altered permanently in shape. It is just such an assemblage of forces pressure in one direction, resistance in another, general tendency towards a centre and repulsion from the centre by virtue of the accumulation already there of which the globe consists, and to which it owes its shape, rotation on its axis, and motion round the sun. If, then, each separate stone by the wayside plays a part in a system so extensive and so complete, how can its existence lifeless, motionless, as it seems be anything than the most active that can be imagined ? Again, if we look round on Nature, we discover certain forms of existence which we may term .permanent ; yet> 92 BIIAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. these very permanent forms only exist by virtue of the incessant change which they are undergoing. The oak- tree, which gave Adam its shadow in the happy garden, and the nightingale which hallowed Eve's connubial sleep, are seen again to-day ; the oak-tree has the same shaped leaves, the nightingale the same warbling song, though the identical oak and nightingale which we are supposing to have inhabited Eden have both long since perished. We view a waterfall, and make drawings of its shape and measurements of its altitude, and we con- sider it the same waterfall ten years afterwards, when we find it occupying the same place and exhibiting the same form as the one represented in our drawing of ten years' old. Yet no one will suppose that, after an interval of ten years, we see the same water, the same plants, or even the same rocks ; for, while it will be readily admitted that fresh floods have been continually flowing over the pre- cipice, and fresh plants springing up in the surrounding soil, it must be remembered also that the rocks have been also wearing away above, while a deposit of fresh particles is being continually made by the water below. Yet, in all these mutable things and Nature is equally mutable all through the Invariable in type is to be easily traced, for that does exist even more definitely than the very mutation which we see. The idea of a waterfall is the invariable result which the fall of an ever-renewing flood the dispersion of an endless succession of drops the roaring and foaming of particles which never remain an, instant, in the same position, convey to the mind; so that out of a aeries of effects we gain one thought, which may be called the thought of Nature inherent to this parti- THE SOUL IN NATURE. 93 cular phenomenon. There is no animal, plant, mineral, or gas, but is passing through a succession of changes, growth, decay, dissolution, re-combination ; yet each one has a permanent existence by virtue of the thought which it represents, because the laws of Nature are constant; and however fleeting and fading the forms of the world, the idea of creation is continually reproduced, and through the medium of the ever-changing material, the unchanging and eternal spirit is to be seen. The moment we arrive at this stage of thought, we perceive how hollow are those assertions of the superiority of matter how vain those endeavours to disprove the existence of mind, over which so many have wasted their lives, hopelessly forswearing the very intellect which by its partial views led them into a complexity of errors. Before this fact, the very earth passes into the condition of a shadow ; and beyond the almost intangible forms of material existence lies a thought more solid than the adamant a thought which operates silently, and finds representation in that world of change which lives only to embody the idea of permanence. The flower, the tree, the cloud, the sunbeam, the granite rock, have no existence but as letters of the alphabet of Nature. As letters in an alphabet, they are woven and interwoven into syllables and words, and as letters of an alphabet again displaced to enter into new combinations. As letters of an alphabet they exist also, not for themselves, but as elements through which Intelligence is spelt into expression, and thought fashioned into visible form. What is the flower but an assemblage of tissues, which is again but an assemblage of gases ? What is the cloud 94- BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. but an assemblage of water-drops, atmospheric air, elec- tricity, and ammonia ? That same water, air, electricity, and ammonia, fall in a shower, and are each absorbed by the plant; and, to-morrow, the very same elements, which appeared in the heavens like a golden car for the sun, or a group of cherubim winging upward through the ether, are seen in the form of a lowly violet, the elements that formed the cloud lend softness to its purple tint, freshness to its grateful odour, and healthy-greenness to its heart-shaped leaves ; how, then, could the cloud which yesterday floated in the blue heaven, and to-day forms the tissues of a plant, be said to have any existence but as a letter in an alphabet which Nature is everlast- ingly weaving into prose syllables or poetic rhymes ? But there is a higher fact revealed in this philosophy, namely, that the laws which we perceive working as instruments of power are the laws of reason, and are as truly in harmony wiiii tiie human mind as with that higher mind from which all things spring. So true is it, that naturalists have frequently deduced natural laws from reason alone, and have afterwards discovered them really existing in Nature. From the fact that bodies mutually attract each other, Newton deduced, that as the distances of bodies increase, their mutual attraction decreases ; and that an effect proceeding from one point becomes weaker in proportion as the square of distances increases. Both these conclusions have been verified by appeals to Nature, and the true laws of planetary motions have thus been traced out as fruits of human reason resting on its own strength alone, and asserting that such and such must 6e, because such and such already THE SOUL IN NATURE. 95 exist. Kepler's great laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies were discovered in this way ; and it is well known that Leverrier measured the weight, velocity, distance, and constitution of the planet Neptune without, having seen it, and so determined its existence by the aid of reason alone. By the very fact that man is part of Nature, so his reason is also natural, or in harmony with the reason manifested in natural law. Were the laws of nature antagonistic to the infinite reason, they could not exist ; were they inconsistent with human reason, man could not comprehend them; hence we know that, in the great unity of the spiritual and material, man is also concerned, and inseparably united in the living idea of the Almighty power by whom all things are created. From the moment that we perceive this truth, the walls of space and time -fall down, and the soul finds an inheritance of immortality in its merely spiritual exist- ence, needing none of the aids of external reasoning to endow it with everlasting life. . The philosophy of the beautiful is wrapped up in this fact. Metaphors and poetical images derive their origin and significance from it. The analogies which the imaginative mind readily perceives between objects which to ordinary apprehension seem so dissimilar, are traceable to the same source. Indeed, strictly speaking, the whole creation is only a bundle of analogies. We are accustomed to the recognition of beauty, and seldom pause in our admiration to inquire the source of the beautiful. Yet the beautiful is to be found by the man of science, and is merely the last- expression of a 90 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. series of minute facts. Take the instance of the foun- tain : in this, the rising jet of water consists of a number of particles, all spherical in form, which, as they ascend, gradually increase in breadth, and at last bend over in the form of a parabola and descend to the basin. The velocity continually decreases from the point where the jet first rushes forth to the point where it bends over in a graceful curve, and it is this decrease of velocity in ascending which gives the column of water its taper- ing form, for it always tapers downwards from a broad convex sheet to a thin compressed jet. This downward tapering of the column and parabolic outline of the falling summit are what most readily strike us as beauti- ful in a fountain, and these phenomena are simply the result of the opposing forces of the rising jet and attrac- tion of the earth. The prismatic colours and the rich, musical tones also combine to complete the harmony, and thus the idea of the fountain is the result of an assemblage of details, each of which contributes an essential part of the whole. Man, too, is a part of this ; his soul is a part of the great soul which pervades Nature ; and to every beat of his heart the great heart of the universe answers with a kindred throb. By his relationship to outward things, he is enabled to comprehend them, and, in so doing, he finds that the laws of the external world are consistent with the thoughts within himself. Does such a conclu- sion make him dread mortality ? if so, let him trust the history of his soul to faith, which is as much above reason as reason is above the brute matter on which it impresses its speaking image. If the " clodded earth," THE SOUL IN NATURE. 97 sending up its breath in flowers, has a soul by which it is united to all the links of diversified being; if man, too, has a soul not merely obedient to reason as in the brutes, but awakened to self-consciousness and so far free in agency, then, by all these links of causation, he shall trace up his relation to God, the first link in this trembling chain of spiritual impulses. Into his nostril did Deity breathe the breath of life, and this soul, which beats its wings eternally within his brain and bosom, is the incarnation of that holy breath which brought him into being. Tor this reason, while he fears not to admit that the material forms of the world are the least tangible, so, for his own soul, he can afford to rest on faith. 98 THE SPARROW. confess to a great partiality for the sparrow. There is something hearty in his impudence (London boys call him "cheeky/') something funny in his domestic habit, and in his love very much of the heroic. Our partiality, though, has a deeper source than the super- ficial traits of sparrow-life, and springs from the con- stancy of the sparrow as an associate of man every- where. He is the last representative of bird-life left to the smoke-dried citizen, just as the grass is the last relic of vegetable life which still clings to him. The sparrow will make itself a home in the most sooty covert under grim tiles, and between the blackened chinks in chimneys and waterspouts ; and the grass will spring up between the flags in the closest court or alley, or on the most barren heap of rubbish in a dirty corner. This proximity to us, however, is fatal to the sparrow as an object of study, and when an amateur ornithologist commences the formation of a museum, the sparrow is the last specimen that finds a home there. We watch our human neighbours too closely, and very often allow slander to supply what ignorance suffers to escape ; but our out- door neighbours, the sparrows, are, from their THE SPARROW. 99 very neighbour-like qualities, overlooked, and substituted in the attention by things more rare. We shall, there- fore, recount the history of the sparrow, and say a few words on his character as a social being, hoping thereby " to point a moral and adorn a tale." The house-sparrow (Fringilla Domestica) belongs to the most interesting of the bird families, being a member of the FringiUida, or the Finches, which includes most of the birds of song, and those immediately interesting in their association with man. Spread pretty equally over Europe and the north of Africa, on the plains of India, and in the passes of the Himalaya, he is every- where the companion of man, and is the only bird whose habit it is to be at every season in close attendance on human dwellings. Considered as an individual, the sparrow exhibits a remarkable mixture of opposite quali- ties. When made to pass through the sanitary processes which a city sparrow requires for the exhibition of his aboriginal clothing, he appears in a true quaker garb, of chesnut, ash, and black, trim in clothing, pert in manner, positively pretty, yet still quakerish. But he belies his looks ; for he is a thief, a pugilist, and an everlasting gossip. He is everything by turns, and adapts himself to every new condition and circumstance, without the least regard to that motto of Emerson's which requires us to " walk upright and vital," and to maintain our integrity under all trials. He will eat the daintiest food, and, if that is not at hand, will forage on any dustheap, and eat the veriest garbage. Even in. feeding he is a paradox ; for if the supply be scant, he searches keenly, and is content with what he finds him- H2 100 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. self; but the moment he lights in a land of plenty as, for instance, a stone-pavement covered with crumbs, or a granary with a hole in the roof he immediately abandons the good habit of foraging on his own account, and filches from his neighbour. He has great faith in the sweet flavour of forbidden food, and eats that which he has stolen with indescribable relish. But it is as a member of a community that the sparrow appears in his true light. He is a sociable fellow and loves company. Nothing more delights him than to meet a score of his companions on the top of a pear-tree within view of a kitchen " whence smells arise " along with pieces, and there to beguile the afternoon with small conversation, and the first lines of songs which none of them can sing through, with occasional sallies after food, and then a fight or two, and a gossip, as before. At roosting-time he has compunctions; and, for fear he should die in the night cut off by a black cat even in the act of digesting the stolen provender he turns reli- gious, and mumbles a few disjointed prayers, with his head leaning on an ivy leaf, and, after another incoherent gossip, dozes off in a state of plethoric sobriety. The sparrow is precocious. He enters the world " on his own hands " or claws, at six weeks old ; he quarrels with his parents, and attempts to kick them out of the nest a day or two afterwards, and goes on all sorts of voyages and travels, and gets steeped in crime within two months of being fledged. When nine months old, he marries and sets up a domestic establishment, and during courtship, and the first of the honeymoon, keeps the neighbourhood in constant alarm with his repeated THE SPARROW. 101 quarrels and sanguinary fights. He is great in war, particularly that ignoble warfare which may be best likened to an Irish row, wherein ten or fifteen rush pell- mell together in the branches of a pear-tree, each with a war-whoop of his own, while fighting all the rest, and the whole body rushing together in a confused heap of birds and voices, as if they would sacrifice their blood to the last drop. Just as they have converted the highest fork of the tree into a Thermopylas, and Xerxes and the Greeks are heaped together, beak and claw, the fight suddenly ceases, and a few scattered chirps are all that remain of the fierce din of battle. These rows chiefly take place in spring ; towards the middle of June they have entirely ceased ; and the summer and autumn pass tranquilly, without a single breach of the peace. When on the point of marriage the sparrow's life is indeed one of excitement. He has his home to build, his bride to protect, and what with the search for food and building materials, and the frequent challenges to combat to which his love prompts him, beak, claw, and wing are kept in great activity. He is by no means fastidious in regard to the material of his nest ; and, like an Arab in the desert, he makes freehold property of any spot that suits him, and there determines to build his home, and die if necessary in defending it. Every variety of size, fabric, and locality enters into the details of sparrow nests. If moss and feathers are to be had, none know better how to appropriate them, and if these comforts are scarce, he weaves together bits of rag, straws, wisps of hay, dry grass, and every variety of tex- tile refuse which finds its way out of doors ; sometimes 102 BRAMBLES ANi> BAY LEAVES. labouring with much pride of heart in the construction of a neat circular nest, and at others, crowding together enough "marine stores " to fill a hat, content with the dirtiest hole at the top of a waterspout for its reception. When he builds in a tree which is very seldom, though Professor Rennie says to the contrary he usually con- structs a domed nest; that is, a large globular framework of straw and feathers, with a hole in the side for ingress and egress ; so that a good shelter is afforded by the circular roof and walls. In the country he houses under ricks, and in holes in barns, and very often turns the martin out of doors, and takes possession of its mud- cabin ; but in town he mostly creeps into the holes and recesses amongst chimneys, eaves, and broken brickwork; and always covers the floor of his castle with a thick malting to protect his mate and her brood from the cold. Owing to the partiality of the sparrow for bits of thread and woollen rag, he sometimes gets entangled in the fastenings of his own tent; and it is not uncommon for fierce struggles to take place under the tiles, where some unlucky cock or hen has got entrapped. He partly deserves this for the careless way in which he builds his walls, but he scarcely deserves to be hanged in his own noose when pursuing his calling industriously. Such fatal catastrophes happen, however, and not a few spar- rows fall victims to their propensity for woollen goods. Rennie relates an instance of a pair of sparrows which had carried off a long piece of bass, but when this had been successfully stowed in the nest, it appeared they had not sufficient skill to work it into the fabric, anil both birds got their feet inextricably entangled in tho THE SPARROW. 103 folds, and were held close prisoners. Around them assembled their cackling neighbours, who appeared to be occupied in scolding them for their folly, instead of imitating the mouse that released the lion in assisting them to get rid of their entanglements. They were taken down and freed from their fetters, but were too exhausted to survive their struggles, and a pair of their scolding neighbours took possession of their premises a few days after. A note in the first volume of the Zoological Journal states that a pair of sparrows, which had built at a house at Poole, were observed to continue their regular visit to the nest long after the time when the young birds take flight. This unusual circumstance continued throughout the year, and in the winter, a gentleman who had all along observed them, determined on inves- tigating its cause. He mounted a ladder, and found one detained a prisoner by means of a piece of string or worsted, which formed part of the nest, having become accidentally twisted round the leg. Being thus incapa- citated from procuring its own sustenance, it had been fed by the willing and watchful parents. A still more tragical occurrence is related m tne London News of January 20, 1844. A sparrow had built its nest in the eye-socket of the carved head of an ox, which formed part of a frieze of one of the buildings in Sackville Street, Dublin. By some means he had got his neck into a noose, and in struggling to get free had fallen out of the nest, suspended by the neck, like a wretched criminal, from the eye-socket of a skull. But the sparrow's cares do not end with nest-building. Some fine spring morning he wakes up as usual, and finds 104 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. his mate in an ecstasy of chirping, and looking round him, discovers an oval egg, with a very white ground, variegated with ash and brown spots and streaks. Before he goes to roost, the cackling begins again, and as he comes in with a caterpillar for supper, she shows him another, and so on, till there are five or six. Then is he a husband in earnest. No intruding sparrow dare take shelter near his nest ; no cat even warm it with her feline breath. He is all wings and claws, and his beak is a dagger to transfix every enemy to his domestic peace. He is an example of perpetual motion, too, and hurries here and there for dainty bits of meat which the cook has thrown out, fat snails, hirsute caterpillars, pickings from the pig-trough, and bread-crumbs, carrying them into the nest for his faithful partner, who receives each with a low chuckle of satisfaction. Not food alone, but every stray feather, wisp of wool, or bunch of cotton- thread is carried up also to increase the warmth of the nest, and preserve the eggs from chill, while both the parents are away in the morning and evening. He not only knows no fatigue in his unceasing search for food, but he takes his turn at sitting while she airs herself at daybreak, and the moment she returns he darts off again in search of feathers, grubs, and bread-crumbs. He is the model husband now, and has given up fighting and quarrelling. By-and-by there are weak voices crying for food, and a number of naked children stare him in the face, all crying in one dismal tone, as they squat in a confused heap with their wide yellow gaping mouths, for continued supplies. He is astonished at the voracity of his own children ; they would eat up mother and father THE SPA11EOW. 105 if they had but the strength to do it. He flies here, there, and everywhere ; and however much he brings, there is always the same cry, and the same cluster of gaping jaws to greet him. It is enough for both parents now to keep their six juvenile gizzards grinding, while the six juvenile mouths, like separate and determined Olivers, keep crying out for " more ! " With this attention and good feeding, the babes in the nest soon become babes in the wood, and the fond pa- rents, inflated with pride, take out their chelping children on short excursions over tiles and parapets, and then down into gardens, where they both feed them alter- nately from their own mouths. While the father is offering them what he has brought in his bill, the mother is foraging elsewhere, and when she returns, he darts off again, and thus protection and food are both adminis- tered. A week's exercise in this way completes the education of the fledglings, and then the sparrow colony breaks up ; the old citizen birds leave the town to sun themselves in corn-fields, and make acquaintance with the rustics that dwell in the thatch. An ivied wall, which has sheltered fifteen or twenty pairs in spring, is almost deserted before July, and the cheerful chelping that woke the townsman in the morning, and cheered him as he took tea at the open window in the evening, is now scarcely heard, a few young birds of the new brood being all that are left to people the once populous city in the ivy. The sparrow is never silent long, and so these few keep up the sparrow music through the summer ; and, to an ordinary observer, who sees wings in motion in every garden, and hears the unmistakable ]06 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. sparrow chirp all day long, the houses seem by no means deserted. But he would only need to watch them as they come to roost, to note the comparison between the few that remain, and the crowds that haunted the same roosting-grounds in spring. Towards September the numbers thicken, and when the last gleaning is carried from the harvest-field, those that remained with the gleaners turn their faces to the town, and in a short time the gardens and the eaves are crowded. The morning matins and the evening vespers are as loud as ever, and there is something really cheer- ing in the confused chaos of voices, and the whirring of wings, and rustling of feathers, which blend so harmo- niously with the growth of the morning daylight and the increase of the evening darkness. "Just as the leaves begin to fall," says Rusticus, " the sparrows begin to hold their 'evenings at home;' and strange evenings they are ; such chattering and chirping ; such hopping up and down; such changing of places; such bicker- ing and squabbling; such fidgetting and wriggling; the row often lasting more than an hour, and only ceasing when they have chattered themselves to sleep." To- wards winter, the sparrow grows impudent, bold, and thievish. He will feed at your feet if you give him en- couragement, and may be tempted to the window-ledge for crumbs, or into the room, even, with a little patience, and the absence of everything likely to threaten his safety. As soon as Christmas is past, he looks out for the green sprigs of bulbous plants, and nibbles down the snow-drops and crocuses, and enlivens the dull days of February and March with his incessant chatter and THE SPAttROW. 107 repeated quarrels. It is not fair, however, to charge him with indiscriminate destruction; there are few garden plants for which he has any regard, and the vast havoc he makes in the insect broods amply compensates for the stealing of a little green meat for his young ones. But the sparrow has his enemies. He lives no life of uninterrupted enjoyment. His acts of petty larceny bring upon him the vengeance of the farmer, who sets a price upon his head, and thereby encourages vagrancy and destructiveness in all the ragged urchins of a village. Arsenic, nux vomica, and baited traps, are offered him, and he takes his choice and dies forthwith, to haunt the fields afterwards in a ghostly shape, and revenge himself by watching the growth and multiplication of cater- pillars caterpillars which he, if living, would have destroyed, but which, left to fatten on the farmer's crops, entail upon him ten times the cost of a sparrow. Then there is the screech owl, who now and then finds her way to the nest when both parents are out, and gobbles up the callow brood, and, if she could, would do a similar office for the parents. But the windhover hawk is his most deadly enemy. He dreads the high-flying mouser, and has no appetite for growing corn when she is within sight. It is seldom that he suffers in a positive way, for the windhover is mostly content with a few mice and cockchafers, but the dread is instinctive; he knows the hawk-like swoop, and he cowers under cover without making the necessary distinctions. As to scare- crows, he snaps his bill at such in perfect contempt. He views them as demonstrations of eccentricity, 108 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. matters for amusement rather than fear, and after a careful survey of a straw-stuffed man, with boots turned behind, and face without expression, he deems it the relic of some gunpowder-plot freak, and so far from being frightened, chooses it immediately as a suitable spot for his nest. Old hats stuffed with red rags, dead dogs and cats crucified on broom sticks, and rows of gay ribbons threaded on sticks, he holds in equal dis- regard, and if puzzled by them for a day or two, pays no more attention to them after he has seen their empti- ness ; and as to boys with horns and clappers, he takes no alarm from their hideous noises, but keeps at a safe distance in case of stones. Thus, in every sense, the sparrow is very individual; his ways and means are interesting, though neither song nor plumage claim any particular regard. He has character, and that redeems him from indifference. Song and plumage are both poor things compared with character : it is character we seek in men; and strong individualities make even rogues tolerable ; for, after all, Will, which is the foun- dation ot individuality, compels reverence, no less in feathered than in coated bipeds. 1C9 THE INNER LIFE. EMERSON remarks in his beautiful essay on. "Gifts/' that "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents, flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern counte- nance of ordinary nature; they are like music heard out of a workhouse ;" and it is in the sympathy which all natural objects have for the best sentiments of our nature which makes them always acceptable. Man is something more than a bundle of petty cares and jealousies : he has within him a world of living beauty, and an existence ever seeking for closer sympathy with moral worth, and anxiously striving after higher states of perfection. But in the intercourse of men with each other the tendencies, and desires, and passions, which have been implanted within them for purposes of beauty and beauty is the highest form of utility get pushed beyond the legitimate sphere of their action, and become characterized in their development as vices. Hence, in all cities and large aggregations of men, the true nobility and intrinsic stamp of human character is sunk below the duplicities which float upon the surface of customs 110 BKAMBLES Afct) BAY LEAVES. and usages. Thus civilization, viewed in a narrow and partial light, has all the appearance of soul-murder ; but, seen through the "optic glass " of a transcendental philosophy, simply indicates a necessary phase of the human mind in its progress upward; and is a manifes- tation, not of the destruction and annihilation of virtue, but of the perversion and distortion of our legitimate aims and actions. To look at modern society in its existing state of complexity and petty warfare, it has all the semblance of a huge mad-house ; but, seen as a neces- sary condition of the human mind in its transition from a rugged barbarity to a high and exalted morality and beauty, it appears as a plain fact, but significant of the multiform changes and modifications of the same iden- tical purpose, still striving to evolve itself through all the ages of the world. But when we leave this inclosed world of antipodean and twisted interests, where we are eternally compelled to hedge and dodge, and dance a shapeless game of evasion, and go into the pine woods or mountain soli- tudes, where Nature still wears the freshness of a primeval morning, and awaits with complacent brow, and meekly folded hands, the appeals of her repentant children ; we come into the sheen and lustre of a new- made life, and grow young again in the beauty and sim- plicity of a rugged and heroic virtue. The soul, tat- tered and despoiled, and weather-beaten in the strife and storm of petty contentions and mean and degrading tendencies, awakens again to the vigour and freshness of its true life, and seems to have been made anew. With uien, the true soul seems ever in the presence of a blight THE INNER LIFE. Ill or pestilence, and droops and fades as in the hot and parching air of a sirocco : but with Nature, the true old love of innumerable ages comes dawning upon it, and it grows and expands in the opening of a new future, a future teeming with truth and beauty ; and finds in this new realm of thought and perception an insight into its highest tendencies. In the buzz and distracting whirl of the world, the only hope of satisfaction seems to be in sorrow, for there we expect to meet with "sharp peaks and edges of truth/' but in Nature all is per- petual jubilee and song, and every feature wears the aspect of festive hilarity, pure, ennobling, and true. The sunshine of Paphian skies seems ever dawning upon the horizon of a holier hope ; the warmth and fruition of a new summer seems ever alighting upon the petals of unfading flowers; and in the dark brows of Dodonian oaks we see the type of ceaseless renewal and unspared exuberance. The soul grows and grows, and feels in its inmost recesses the awakening light and divinity of its highest spiritual truths. Life is a constant flux of moods or conditions, evan- escent and transmutable, yet, together, forming a great circle in which the true character is encentred. Be the mood what it may, it is but a reflex of the combined conditions of the true character which lies beneath, and the outward and visible influences which surround us. Every man wishes for good, wishes to attain to the practice of virtue, and to gather to himself the noblest thoughts ; but while we glide hither and thither under masks and pretensions, we mutually deceive ourselves and others, and the world comes at last to wear the 112 BRAMBLES ANB BAY LEAVES. garb and colouring of a fantastic dream. But with Nature all is pure, all is true, constant and abiding, and from every thread of her endless fabric of loveliness comes a voice of sympathy and love. Thus it is, that in our earlier life, before the soul is enveloped in cobwebs and dust, that the love of nature is warmest in the heart ; and that ever afterward, when that same love awakens in us, we feel the replenished vigour of an ascending life, and the untold joy of primal beauty. We seem to be brought back again to the flowery brink of our budding youth, and to stand once more upon the threshold which then separated the sweet years of childhood from the mysterious, yet promising future which then lay before us; and in which our ambition and our hopes were coined into realities, by the energies of our hands and the firmness of our hearts. There is ever hope for that man who feels the fresh- ness of his youth like a soft fragrance fanning his hot brow, when he wanders into the wild solitude, where Nature still beams in the radiance of untroubled tran- quillity, and the hand of man has not yet begun the work of demolition, but where all is vigour, and fresh- ness, and reality. Beside the mountain torrent, gleam- ing as with the light of a perpetual morning, and in the pine woods, where night hovers all day long, he feels the purple flush of youth once more upon his cheek, and the generous sympathies of his earlier life burning in his heart. Then emotions are kindled in the breast, of which even an angel might be proud, and to live is a joy unutterable. Memory is then a sweet picture; THE INNER LIFE. 113 Love is an odour breathing of Heaven ; Hope sits beside us and points upwards lovingly, and the inheritance of life is a boon more sacred than the possession of a world, for it gives us more than a world an Universe of beauty within ourselves. This is why, in the first efforts of the anxious heart, that all books which set forth the harmonies of Nature are eagerly devoured. Every genuine student will re- member when the most simple and unassuming books possessed inexpressible charms, if they but spoke in harmony with the poetry and moral sympathies which dwelt within his own breast ; if they breathed of green fields and flowers, and sought to embody and embalm all that was beautiful in sentiment, and simple in thought. When we look back to our earliest readings in the great book of Nature, and our first communings with Nature's worshippers, we seem carried to some sweet oasis in the dreary wilderness of life, where nothing but beauty, and the aspirations for a higher life could find a place. Then every book which had the least smell of green fields or water brooks, or was in any way imbued with the poetry of Nature, was devoured page by page, as if it w r ere manna but just fallen from heaven. The high philosophy of beauty, in which the ancients delighted, is a better symbol of the manifestation of the sentiment than any which modern poets can afford. They said "that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects but those of this world, which i 114 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of the beautiful bodies, as aids to its recollec- tion of the good and fair." * And, although the first utterances of the Inner Life are seen in the youth in the love of Nature, and a growing fondness, and a kindling sympathy for that higher beauty, which is in itself im personal, and beyond the stretch of thought, and which may flash upon him from the sunset, the gleam of water- falls which leap amid wild islands green, the silence or the sleep of nature, or the dove-like eyes of the loved one of his heart ; yet, this is but the first spark of a sen- timent, which shall hereafter enlarge into a warm and generous flame, to light up all the world with the radi- ance of a new hope, and to bring the bosom in which it burns nearer to God. The awakening of the soul to the perception of beauty, encircling and multiplied, is its first step to the appreciation of beauty special. Then it expands in a sentiment more lofty and pure, and love becomes the ruling passion of the heart, and is a wreath of flowers upon manhood's brow. This new delight is but a sympathy made forceful and predominating, and for us it re-makes the world, and forges all nature into spangles and stars, and summer sheen, and song, and makes every leaf and cloud articulate. " It gives the brow of age A smack of youth, and makes the lip of youth Shed perfumes exquisite." Emerson. THE INNER LIFE. 115 This sentiment is ennobling, because it springs from that deep well of inexhaustible beauty which lies within us, unsullied and serene. It is the bond which shall unite all men and women together, and form them into one great circle of good and generous souls. Love is our highest assurance of this inward self, for beneath it Nature hides the greatest purpose which she has to accom- plish, namely, the perpetuity of the species. And if, when it shall knock at the door of our hearts^ we give joy to its divine presence, and greet it as a ray of ethereal loveliness flashed out of the abyss of God, it will find us young, and keep us so for ever. The province of the soul is not the province of the intellect. The spring of all feeling is from within, the source of all idea from without. The one is the office of the mind, the other the possession of the heart. Senti- ment, an innate moral perception, is self-existent ; intel- lect is the result of experience, and is acquired during time. Even Locke admits that " though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called an internal sense." The perceptions of moral beauty, of conscience, of virtue, of infinity, of God, are the facul- ties of the soul, and that takes cognizance of the outer world only to read therein the symbols of its own egres- sive law, and the constant exodus of its highest intelli- gence. It is only through the channel of the memory that the mind can take cognizance of a state of feeling or a sentiment ; for the emotions of the heart love, friend- ship, paternal care, pity or remorse, are not processes of logical sequence are independent and foreign to all i 2 116 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. analysis, and are states or conditions self-induced to accord with the symbols which exist outwardly ; as posi- tive electricity always generates in the body with which it comes in contact a negative fluid, in order to restore the harmony between them. To the soul, virtue is aboriginal; self-existent, not induced. It perceives and appreciates there and then, without weighing and estimating what pertains to itself; and plucks its own fruit where it stands, if there the fruit be. It is independent of experience, and does not perceive its objects in any relation as to time. In what bosom soever it abides, it sheds fragrance and music, as though flowers were blooming there, and angelic fingers were sweeping the tough fibres of the heart, to make them overflow with melody. Every scene and home of life is made sacred by it ; and Nature, conscious of its high relations to the Most High God, always heralds the great phases of its doom. The tendency of the age is to sensualism on the one hand, and to extreme intellectualism on the other. But however grand and imposing the achievements of the intellect, in the wonders of the laboratory or the engine- house, that alone is insufficient. We care too much for algebra, and chemistry, and the affairs of the household, and too little for that of the church ; nay, every house- hold should become a church, where the pervading spirit of all loveliness may sit enshrined, and where her votaries may kneel with fervent hearts to worship and offer sacri- fice. It is our consuming folly to view all things in the cold light of the intellect, and to judge by the acquisition of facts, rather than by the enlargement of the highest THE INNER LIFE. 117 sentiments. Are facts so necessary then? Have you exhausted all your previous stock ? Or do you sit brooding there for some expected truth which shall show you the hollowness of your ways, but which, while you sit there, and shut your ears to the beseechings of the soul, shall never come, and you shall die at last a beggar. The sovereignty of the intellect has dwindled into cant, as much soul as you can muster avails ; maugre that, all is barrenness and ashes. Events strengthen not the hope, for no length of time will ever ripen the contents of an empty barrel. If the intellect is our highest faculty, how comes it that so many of those who have been so highly endowed with this inheritance, have only died at last covered with shame at the perverted nature of their lives? who, while stalking like petty gods among men, and transcending by the giant powers of their minds, have yet left a blight and pestilence in their path, as venemous reptiles leave their slimy tracks behind them. The names of Alexander, Pericles, Aspasia, Cataline, Alcibiades, Mirabeau, and Napoleon, only sug- gest a thousand more which might be quoted. And much to be deplored are the effects of our systems of trade, commerce, and education, in checking the growth of the best sentiments of our nature. The slow and steady calculations of gain and loss are appended, like badges of charity, to every effort which the pure soul would make to rescue some relic of itself from the wreck and destruction in which it finds itself immersed, and which threaten almost to strike God from the world. The influence of the senses is to circumscribe all things, and make the walls of space and time look solid and real, 118 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. and to surround us with a world of insanity and corrup- tion ; but the moment we suffer the soul to speak, we become advertized of the great possibilities of our being, and a heaven of truth opens before us, in which we may bathe as in an ocean which has neither let nor bound, and even to us, the attributes of God become possible. " The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui vanish all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons." The moment the soul is assured of its acceptance to this universal realm, it acquires a new life, and a beaming satisfaction. Plato says, "lookest tkou at the stars ? If I were heaven, with all the eyes of heaven would I look down on thee ?" and to the soul which is conscious of its high regard for the plain and solid beauty of its presentiments, the whole universe becomes but the speaking semblance of itself, and the bond of union between it and those it holds most dear. All that the poet can teach us is his own impotency to express adequately the sentiments and feelings which surround us with each pulsing of the soft air, and with each echo of the wheeling sky. This power which abides within us is higher than intellect, more potent than will, and works through every fibre of our living hearts for good and beautiful purposes. It is the living soul of the world, the Alpha and Omega of this passing life, the primum mobile of all the virtues, and the vital force of all heroic actions. It is a power above the bolts and bars of thought, and fills up the space between the earth THE INNER LIFE. 119 and heaven. It endows us with the rose of immortality, and gathers round us all the moments of the past and future : it cau crowd a whole eternity into one hour, one single hour of immeasurable bliss. 120 THE LAJSTD OP BLACKBERRIES. " What tho' no charms my person grace, Nor beanty moulds my form, nor paints my face ? The sweetest fruit may often pall the taste, While sloes and brambles yield a safe repast." BLACKLOCK'S Plaintive Shepherd. TALK not of the luscious land of vines ; sing not the praises of blue heavens and rivers which flow through vintage banks ; of Rhines, and Moselles, and Rhones, and Danubes ; forget that there are regions of towering palms, and fruitful bananas, and golden prairies reaching to the sea, lands all fragrant with magnolia blossoms, and jungles where the richest fruits rot, untouched, upon the mould; sigh not for Grecian vales and isles of Paphos ; nor pine for the rose-gardens of Cashmere, nor for the scented bowers where the bulbul sings. Know that here, in this island of green meadows and luxuriant hedgerows, we speak the tongue of Lydegate ; that we are compatriots with Spencer, Chaucer, Shakspere, and Keats ; and that it is the land of beechen woods and Druidical memorials ; and above all, let us be grateful to the Providence which has placed us in the Land of Blackberries. THE LAND OP BLACKBERRIES. 121 Blackberries ! rich, juicy, cool, and gushing, which, in the days of boyhood, lured us with their jetty luscious- ness, and made us forget old Horace and the Pons Asi- norum, and in exchange for the Eton Grammar and the pickled birch, gave us a larger life in the green woods, made our young hearts beat with hopeful enthu- siasm, and filled us with the first taste of life's poetry. Who then but would love blackberries, even though less delicious and ref resiling to the palate than they really are ? Who but would love the simple fruits which re- called the memories of orchard-robbing, school-mischief, April fools, holiday rambles, and frantic dogs with kettles or crackers at their tails ? Blackberries, ah ! away we go, the sunshine is still blinking among the trees, and although the air grows chill, autumn is still ruddy, and the hedges are yet fruitful. There is Epping Forest, whither we went from Stepney at eight years of age " Blackberrying." We knew almost every dell, and cover, and tangled copse, and from any path could lead you direct to the richest garden of Blackberries. We knew the haunts of Hornsey, and Finchley, and Old Ford now, alas ! little towns, or appendages to London long before we were twelve years of age ; and many a dream of Robin Hood and Will Scarlet have we dreamt there among the fern, after having sated ourselves, after the fashion of Justice Greedy, with the blackest of ripe Blackberries. There was always a charm about it, which neither tattered clothes, nor lacerated hands, nor angry looks at home, nor harsh words at school, could ever dispel ; and to compensate for all the sorrows and trials of school drudgery and book education, we had the 122 BRAMBLES AND BAT LEAVES. nobler education to be gained in the land of Black- berries. And now, after having sunned our hearts in the green ways of Saxon poetry, after having held com- panionship with the forests, and bugles, and green hills of Scott, and luxuriated among the lush and leafy coverts of Endymion Keats, besides many fair-spent hours over Ritson and Robert Herrick, how can we refrain from Icving Blackberries? Blackberries, which speak so winningly of " yellow-girted bees/' and " golden honey- combs," and " jagged trunks/' and " unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness." Love them ? aye ! and away we go into the thick woods, far from the roar of cities and the tramp of men, far from the soul's prison house, into the free air of bosky dells, where ragworts and harebells tremble, and the brambles hang their clouds of fruits. This tune to Cheshunt, fifteen miles from town, in the prettiest part of Hertfordshire. Through the ancient churchyard, glancing at the monuments of the Crom- wells and the grassy mounds of many a sturdy Puritan, superseding Hervey's sickly Meditations, by thoughts which are always better suggested on the spot. Gather- ing as we go any precious little gem which may add to the herbarium, we reacli Cheshunt House, and refresh our memories with the stories of Wolsey's pride and fall ; thence to the shadow of a great beech in Cheshunt Park, to dine upon the grass, and discover a new and most "come again " flavour in the beef and ham, which, despite our worship of the Blackberries, makes us feel keenly for the Vegetarians. Dinner over, through the green lanes to GoftVs Oak, gathering berries as we go, the first handful being offered as a libation to the earth, THE LAND OF BLACKBERRIES. 123 after the manner of school-boys and the ancients. At GoflVs Oak we rest for the night, and enjoy that deli- cious slumber in a snowy bed which can only be enjoyed at a country inn in the laud of Blackberries.* The mornings are grey and misty at Blackberry time, so before venturing on the great expedition we have in view, let us be internally fortified with a good break- fast. The fragrant coffee tickles the sense until the nose seems to laugh at the conceit, and the palate, beguiled by the bland richness of the fresh butter and new-laid eggs, threatens to forget the anticipations of more Blackberries. We are away at last, upon the roadside, gathering as we go from the brambles that skirt the pathways. Away with conventionalities ; fling away the books ; and let us for the present live for Blackberries. The berries are as black as death, and as delicious as the first kiss of a fond lover. There they hang like sugary showers of healing and delectable manna ; hatless, on tiptoe, forgetting drawing-room and parlour courtesy, scorning etiquette and the doctrine of appearances, and like children in our aboriginal wildness, we gather and eat, we eat and gather. Satisfied, we walk on, and take the path to the left, which leads to "Newgate Street" and "Little Berk- * Goffe's Oak stands on Cheshunt Common, overlooking the ancient lands of Guffley, and commanding a splendid panorama of hill country beyond. The tree from which the inn takes its name, is an ancient oak planted in the reign of William the Conqueror, and which is now a hollow ruin, though still bearing a head of foliage. The inn is one of the best samples which remain of the " Good Old Time," and still preserves the English characteristics of female beauty, domestic comfort, and hearty good cheer. 124 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. hampstead." The country, with its woody hills and miles and miles of wheatlauds, turnip-fields, and meadows, swells grandly around us. There are copses and forests of pine stems ; broad fields of cruciferous blossoms glow- ing like golden seas with ripples and billows of amber. Up above lie the woods ; and the partridges and phea- sants whirr away in heavy flight to shelter. The toil up-hill has cooled our energies, so we step in here to a small roadside inn, and seated in the only public room, which serves as a kitchen, pantry, and public parlour, regale ourselves with a sweet draught of " Prior's Entire/' Here are eight houses and a mud cabin, backed on one side by the splendid park of Squire Ellis, flanked to the left with the richly wooded hills, through which the road rises and falls like an undulating line of foam upon a dark green sea of rolling billows ; behind lies the valley we have just left, with its banks of harebells, wild thyme, and yellow ragworts ; and on all hands the country lies basking in sunshine, full of fertile promise, beauty, and vegetable exuberance, and dotted and fringed all over with bushy lines of Blackberries. Down the steep hill towards the wood, up again, as the road passes over the upland, and a new scene breaks upon us. Down again into the thick of the wood, and feast our eyes on the interminable silvery birch masts, which gleam away into the dark background, like the spars of an anchored fleet all wedged together in a green sea of fern, while a solemn rustling in the green twinkling foliage above sounds like a chorus of dryads, or the song of liberated fays, which have been imprisoned in the glens since the days of Oberon and Titania. Blackberries THE LAND OF BLACKBERRIES. 125 again, richer, larger, and more pregnant with the cool mulberry flavour of any yet. Appetite gro\vs keen, and we feel that we could eat all the woods contain, they are so grateful and delicious. Alternating with Blackberries are crab-trees, loaded with fairy fruit; then clumps of willow-herbs, here covered with rich purple blossoms, there powdered with downy seeds , then again, St. John's-wort, then blue scabious, and then broad flushing sheets of crimson lythrum. Blackberries again and again, and stomachs and baskets are filled to repletion. The robins, and chaffinches, and willow wrens, flutter and sing, and chirp about us ; and now and then the rabbit limps along through the brown brake, and the partridges run to cover. Between the singing and chirping of the birds, and the flutter of the wood-pigeon's wing, there is an occasional pause a dead stillness which is so solemn, so palpable to the sense, which has been all but stunned by the fret and din of cities, that it begets fear, and we tremble lest the rest-harrow which blooms on the bank should convert its spines into spears, and threaten us ; or that the earth should gape arid let forth some monster of malignity, such as the knights encountered in the olden time. Silence is new to man, and as strange as it is new ; it is the searching and listening of the suspended sense which begets the mysterious feeling which accom- panies it, and when it comes upon us in the world of green moss, and crushed leaves, and tangled branches, and Blackberries, we feel that we are alone with God, and come nearer to Him in the solitudes, and the silence becomes a new voice, whispering of trust, and faith, and 126 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. renewing love, and steadfast hope in the promised here- after. And here, sitting on the green bank, which is as soft and elastic with the mossy growths of many years as any bed of down ; with the smiling face of one whom we love beside us, let us indulge in a soliloquy on the all-ab- sorbing topic of Blackberries. Not that the silence of the woods needs to be broken by the voice of man, for he, too often, carries strife and tumult into regions which had else known peace, and blights the fresh face of Nature with his iniquities and feverish impulses. Never- theless, it seems meet, and the shadows nod a welcome. Well, this said luscious, jet-black berry, or fruit of the bramble, is a thing of no mean degree, either in its botanical or literary history. Its botanical characteristics ally it closely to the -brilliant roses of our gardens, and to the velvet peach, and the apple and the cherry. It is, in truth, a rose, and its blossom, in shape and arrangement, is a miniature of the rose of the hedges. Its sprays are long and flexible, its juices are wholesome, and its fruit salutary and refreshing. The leaves and stems afford a valuable dye ; and its young tops were anciently eaten by the Greeks as a salad. It grows in every country of Europe ; and over the broad moorlands of the north it produces abundance of its welcome fruits. Its homely name of bramble, from the Anglo-Saxon br Gamble, or bremel (anguis crucians], signifies something furious, or that which lacerates the skin ; * and suggests the hirsute nature of its stems. Hence, "Doth the Bramble Vide Skelton by Dyce, I. pp. 187, 216, 278; and Chaucer's Eomaunt of the Ease. THE LAND OF BLACKBERRIES. 127 cumber a garden ? It makes the better hedge ; where, if it chance to prick the owner, it will tear the thief;"* though in this sense the term is not confined among the Saxon writers to the Blackberry plant, but applied to others which are ragged and thorny. For instance : " Swete as is the bramble floure That beareth the red hepe. "+ in which the wilding rose is " the bramble floure," and not our own true Blackberry : though in another use of the word there is no doubt but the Black-\>vny is referred to : " One of hem was a tre That beareth a fruit of sauour wicke, Full croked was that foule sticke, And knottie here and their also, And blacke as berry or any slo." J The Bramble was as much esteemed as an important article in the materia medica of antiquity as it is with us for the juicy coolness of its fruit. " The berries," says Pliny, " are the food of man, and have a dessica- tive and astringent virtue, and serve as a most appro- priate remedy for the gums and inflammation of the tonsils/' I think it is in Hippocrates cited as a grand specific against the bite of serpents, and both berries and blossoms were used in such cases. Pliny also says the young shoots, pressed and reduced to the consistence of honey by standing in the sun, is a singular medicine, * Grew, Cosmologia, III. c. 2. + Chaucer, Rime of Sir Thopas, v. 13. J Chaucer, Rom. Rose. 128 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. taken inwardly, for all the diseases of the mouth and eyes, as well as for the quinsy. The roots, boiled in wine, were used by the Romans for all infirmities of the mouth, for which astringents were necessary; and the young shoots were eaten as a salad to fasten loose teeth. This was not a mere fancy of the old doctors, for all the rubus tribe are eminently astringent; and Withering assigns the same use to the raspberry as the ancients did to the bramble. He says, " the fruit is extremely grateful as nature presents it ; but made into a sweet- meat, with sugar, or fermented with wine, the flavour is improved. It is fragrant, sub-acid, and cooling. It dissolves the tartarous concretions of the teeth, and for this purpose it is superior to the strawberry ."* I imagine it is the astringency of the leaves of the bramble that renders it such a favourite food of goats. On a bank where there is a thorough good mixture of brush- wood and wild stuff, goats will invariably crop first the brambles, and next the shoots that crowd about the roots of elms. Withering says of the raspberry, " the fresh leaves are the favourite food of kids " and Virgil keen rustic as he was had observed the same thing, for he says " On shrubs they browse, and on the bleaky top Of rugged hills the thorny brambles crop."f Another note, from classic sources is worth making here. Pliny says the propagation of trees by layers, was taught the ancients by the bramble bush, which fre- * British Plants, Ed. 1801, Vol. iii., p. 459. f Dryden's Virgil, Georgics iii. p. 489. THE LAND OP BLACKBERRIES. 129 quently forms roots from joints along the stem, when these trail on the ground, or arch over, so as to have their tops entangled with moist herbage. Now a right good plant is this our wayside bramble, and one deserving a nobler vindicator than we. It grows bravely and endures all weathers ; it sits beside the old oaks, and sees age come down and whiten their brows, keeping ever youthful and jovial itself. Eenowned in story, from the time when it caught the garments of Demosthenes, as he fled, coward-like, from the field ;* or when it alleviated, with its rich mellowness, the asperity of the Baptist's "locusts and wild honey;" or was strewed over the graves of Spartan heroes; or wove tassels of leaves and rose-shaped blossoms over the skeletons of Alexander's frozen army ; or over the ghastly remains of humanity in Odin's Wood. Pair and wel- come art thou, humble and unambitious bramble, as when thou wert mingled with the earliest offerings of herbs, or scattered on the green altars of the ancient Gauls ! Beautiful still, as when mingled with ./Esop's happy gift,t when covered with elegies in deification of Rosalind, or when nodding a response to Wordsworth, when he so sweetly sang, " I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sat reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. * Holland's " Plutarch," p. 765. f iEsop made an offering of flowers to the god Mercury, and was rewarded with the gift of inventing fables. K 130 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. To her fair work did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose tufts in that sweet bower The periwinkle trailed its wreaths ; And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes." J3ut, alas ! the learned in the lore of flowers attach to thy blossoms the idea of remorse. There is no cup so pure but dregs may be found at the bottom ; and thou, with thy " gauzy satin frill," and tempting harvest of juicy blackness, art armed from head to foot with thorns, thorns which lacerate and pierce the flesh, and, like the bitter draughts along the path of pleasure, too often bid us taste of one before we reach the other. Why art thou girded round with thorns ? is it that man may not pluck all the fruit, and thus some be left for the little birds who fear not brambles ? or is there some lurking medicine in thy many lancets, such as the Indians seek while rubbing their bodies with the prickly sela, or the old Romans pined for, when they sowed nettles to rub themselves ?* Heaven knows ! perhaps we may get a blessing when we smart the most, and if God wills it, so let it be. If all this availed not to make the bramble pre- cious, and teach the true glory of the Land of Black- berries, what shall avail against the fact (which we have intentionally deferred till now), that they were the only food of the poor "Children in the Wood/' and that Camden's " Britannia." THE LAND OF BLACKBERRIES. 131 from day to day as they wandered through the dreary wilderness unwatched by men, but cared for by God he, with his arm round her little neck, she looking up in his face with a tear in her eye, and amid the occa- sional fears and alarms which beset them, feeling, still safe while guarded by her boy. Who could pluck a Blackberry and think of this without letting fall a tear, and again thanking God that he dwells in a land where the lives and liberties of babes are so sacred, that that old story never yet failed to move a heart, unless it were a heart of stone ; thanking God that it is the land of baby love, of boyish glee, and of Blackberries. Ah ! the robin comes now, year by year, and strews leaves upon the graves of innocence, and the bramble of the hedge- rows is historically consecrated to the precious dust of the departed. See the old grave-digger busy in the country churchyard making a new grave " comfortable/' with sods of grass bound in their places with hoops of bramblerods. Some of those will take root here- after in the rich earth of " God's acre/' and as Tennyson foresaw that the ashes of his friend would nourish the " violet of his native land," so we may see the far off likeness of the lost in the delicate blossom of the brambles unless we rest there too before the summer comes. Jeremy Taylor uses this fact finely in a passage on the uncertainty of the life of man : " The autumn, with its fruits, prepares disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases ; and the spring brings flowers to strew upon our hearse ; and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves." This reminds me that the blossom of our K 2 132 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. plant is a most beautiful production, and there are few of the rich colours of autumn that surpass the fiery hues with which the foliage of the bramble is occasion- ally dashed. It is a moot point whether the white or blush-coloured blossoms are the most numerous ; the authors of " Rubi Germanica " say white prevails, and I think them correct ; but Smith* says, " Flowers erect, handsome, of a delicate pink, rarely, if ever, white/' The prevailing hue is doubtless dependent on soil and climate, but in the same hedge, and on the same plant, nay, on the same stem, pink, blush, and white flowers may be seen side by side, and the white must be awarded the palm for highest beauty. As poetical references for this subject are not plentiful as black- berries, I must take refuge in a lyrical scrap from Hone's Table Book,t which I note down because written in the scene of my own boyish acquaintance with black- berries. THE BLACKBERRY BLOSSOM. WRITTEN IN EPPINO FOREST. " The maiden's blush Sweet blackberry blossom, thou Wearest, in prickly leaves that rove O'er friend-like turning bough. Companionship Thine attributes, thou givest Likeness of virtue shielded safe From foes with whom thou livest * "English Flora." Ed. 1824, vol. ii., p. 400. t No. xxxii., p. 270. THE LAND OP BLACKBERRIES. 133 What is mankind, But like thy wandering? Time Leads mortals through the maze of life, And thousands hopeful climb. A sudden blast Then what of hope remains? Beauty full soon by sickness falls. And pleasures die in pains. But fruit succeeds Thou ripenest by the sky; May human hearts bear fruits of peace Before in earth they lie." August 19, 1827. Well, with childhood's rosy memories, with antique legends and histories, ranging from that earliest age when men fed upon the simplest productions of the ground, when , " Content with food which Nature freely bred, On wildings and on strawberries they fed ; Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest, And falling acorns furnished out a feast/'* down to Rosalind and the Children in the Wood, together with no end of uses in medicine and the arts, and that grandest of all uses, the making of conserves, preserves, tarts, pies, and puddings, and mingled with damsons, the richest syrup in the catalogue of modern confectionary, we say again, Heaven bless the brambles, and ah 1 cheer to the Land of Blackberries ! From the silent wood, by a road to the left, we passed into a picturesque region of farm-houses and ancient * Dryden's " VirgiL'' 134) BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. homesteads ; down a steep hill which gave us another view of the splendid country we had crossed before, and " up hill and down dale," about three miles, brought us back to the GoftVs Oak again. Tea, Oh, how delicious ! Arranged botanical specimens, and " between whiles/' peeped in at the basketful of jet blackberries, and thought of pie crust, sable jam, scalding syrup, and the children in the wood. Six days pass, and each seems more beautiful than its predecessor, till warned of anxieties and cares, and know- ing that commercial interests permit us not without stint to pluck Blackberries for ourselves, we take train, and are once more in a region not of Blackberries, but black bricks, and cold stones, and colder hearts, amid " The weariness, the fever, and the fret, Here, where men sit and hear each other groan, Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where yonth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs ; Where beauty cannot keep her Instrons eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to morrow." There's the bell for dinner. Avaunt! I smell the Blackberries the atmosphere is changed to nectar, and the sunshine stained with sanguine streaks, as I toss a libation of the ruby juice to heaven, and shout, " The Land of Blackberries for ever I * 135 THE SOUL OF SONG. " From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began : From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man." DRTDEN. PHILOSOPHERS tell us that light, heat, and sound, are but the various effects of an agitated or vibrating medium. That a certain number of one kind of vibrations in a given time produce some definite ray of colour; while a definite number of some other kind originate a pecu- liar sound. Sounds thus produced by vibrating currents of air may be either noises or musical tones ; the dis- tinction being dependent entirely on the nature and number of the vibrations. A mere noise is produced by vibrations which have no mathematical proportion one to the other : musical tones result from vibrations which bear mathematical analysis ; each separate tone having its specific number of vibrations, and bearing musical and numerical relation to all other musical tones. Inas- much as red, blue, or yellow light are the productions of waves in the thin ether, so are all sounds, whether of the dear human voice or the dread "rattling thunder" 136 BRAMBLES AXD BAT LEAVES. but effects referable to ripplings or waving of the air. So far, sound is but a simple result of natural causes a plain prose fact. But as the grey and brown tints of the earth are lifted out of the region of prose into that of poetry by the gay hues of flowers, so is human speech, and all other sounds, lifted out of the dead level of mere utility into a region of life by a poetry which asserts itself in song. God has so willed it that while the world brings forth bread for the body, it shall bring forth beauty for the soul. We prize the corn because it nourisheth ; we love the fresh green of the waving wheat because it is a thing of beauty. Words are instru- ments of power, and among the highest in the list of mere utilities; but when the jangle of commerce ceases, and the tender utterance of sympathy begins, how poor the words of the mind, how rich the music of the heart ! Nature ever climbs up towards the spiritual ; she never ceases with use, she must have beauty ; and so she gives man a capacity for the appreciation of harmonious vibra- tions ; and speech dies out as if in shame at its own weakness where the expression of the soul begins. Simple in its source simple in its history, is this fact ; yet how deep it lies in the unity of this circle of the affections how closely bound up with the hopes and joys of living men how suggestive of spiritual life and high aspiration how strong a link in the chain of our destinies. The most ethereal and at the same time the most vague musical expressions, stand as high above verse, as verse the connecting link between conversation and melody does above mere prosy talking. We re- member the air of an old song long after we have for- THE SOUL OP SONG. 137 gotten the words. We may sit unmoved during the recital of the finest verses ; but the moment the harper's fingers sweep the strings, the melody rouses us to a fine fanaticism. The song was body before, it is soul now ; its harmonies are complete ; and to every march of the melody the heart-strings throb responsive. Nature is double all through ; body and soul, matter and spirit, as if the universe were a repeated marriage of the two elements. To the fertility of the fields is added beauty of tint, and form, and colour : the brown soil has a soul, and that soul is the flower, which would exist in vain were there no other souls to make common cause with its life and history. To man the prose of the world is added woman, its poetry. These many spirits of the world seem made for man. The rainbow may span the heavens ; but unless seen by man, its arches have been built in vain. When it bridges over the unpopulated desert, it is but a thousand drops of rain, which the green leaves drink in without knowing of their prismatic beauty ; but when it embraces the corn ridge and the village, a thousand loving eyes look up, and angels are seen treading it as a pathway between the heaven and the earth. Hence, knowing its mission, the rainbow only visits spots where human souls abide. It is for the soul of man that all these many souls are born, and the soul of song as truly so as any. Where is the music of nature so rich as on the skirts of cultivated districts, where flowery gardens feed innumerable humming bees, and thick' bosses of thatch shelter the trusting robin ! It is a fact, that in the deep forest the birds that sing are few; and the more lonely 138 BRAMBLES A^D BAY LEAVES. the spot, the more hoarse and dissonant the voices of the creatures. Everywhere the dear birds hover and flit on hasty wing ; but only near the dwelling of man hover those whose song is sweetest : in his garden they take shelter and bring up their young; in the close copse or mossy orchard they cower from the noonday heat ; and return again and again, in spite of the persecutions they meet with at his hands, to heighten his enjoyments, to cheer his social hours, and renew the sentiments of past delight. In the lonely mere, and over the dark moor- land hover many birds, but they are such as only hoot and scream ; and where the wild waves play together fly seabirds, whose only language is a dismal scream. Nature pushes up towards the region of poetry in sound as she does in colour. As she weaves rainbows from the fragments of a falling cloud, so she struggles to weave music from every voice of animate and inanimate things. The wind howls in the November branches, but sings amid the shrubby foliage of June; the rivulet makes a whizzing sound while creeping through the matted sedge, but laughs like a merry maiden when it sparkles among the yellow pebbles, and tinkles like a bell when it beats up a fallen rock. It is because music stands above all the utilities of sound, because it appeals to the sentiments of men, because it is soul claiming kindred with soul, that man has loved it first among the spiritual possessions of the world, and has sought in its voice an answer to his longings for the good and fair. Nowhere upon the face of all the world is to be found a people in whose hearts music has not a welcome. The rude Indian stands upon THE SOUL OF SONG. 139 the shelly beach and listens in love to the singing of the waves. He suspends the hollow shell upon the delicate fibre of the palm, and strikes it with his hand, that it may give forth song. He fashions the marsh reed or the stem of grass into a flute, and enchants his listening children with its voice. And when the toils of the chase are done, he gathers together his fellow-huntsmen, and in the purple of the evening air they sing together their songs of joy. It was the consciousness of union between the soul of man and the soul of song which begot those lovely con- ceits of antiquity which represented nature as a musical or rhythmic harmony. Plato said, the soul of man was itself a harmony, and had its nearest sympathies in music. Bolder still was the sage of Samos, when he said that the orbs of heaven were so harmonious in their motions that it must be accompanied by ravishing songs, that the worlds warble in their ceaseless march, while the blue deeps beat back the chorus and repeat the echo of their psalms. All fables, when understood, become facts. Orpheus is no fable ; he is the poet skilled in harmony whom the ages honour with the attributes of divinity in remem- brance of the solace which men found in his songs. The Orphic hymns are lost, but fragments of his legendary life remain to testify how closely men cling to the remembrance of pleasure. When Orpheus bewailed the death of his wife Euridyce, the sweet sound of his lyre caused a forest of elms to spring up, and the charm of his harp was so great that the woods nodded, the brown rocks broke their bonds and marched entranced towards 140 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. him. That the extravagance is only superficial, witness the repeated references of poets, who return again and again to these lovely legends because there is a truth beneath them which is universal : " Therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods ; Since naught so stockist], hard, and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature." The universal poet saw the breadth of the myth, and added : " The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds ; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; And his affections dark as Erebus." SHAKSPEHE. The spirit of the world was young when music was made the handmaid of religion; and it still affords a glimpse of that antiquity to know that deeds of heroism and valour were sanctified in song, and that music com- pleted the glory of the inauguration and the festival. Whether at the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isth- mian games, or at the victories of Romulus, 750 years before Christ, when the army, horse and foot, followed the chariot of the conqueror, hymning their gods in songs of their country ; or whether at the marriage feast or the funeral prayer, the charm of music still predomi- nates, interweaves itself with the fate and circum- stances of man, and creeps into his heart like a sunbird seeking for a home. It is this power which rouses a rude peasantry from the lethargy of serfdom to repossess THE SOUL OF SONG. 14-1 themselves of liberties long lost, under the impulse of their national melodies. The effect produced on the Swiss soldiers, when in the service of the French, by an ancient air of the Ranz des VacJies, was so powerful that it was forbidden to be played, so forcibly did it remind the men of the mountainous homes which they had left, and of the hearts that were beating and the eyes that were weeping for them. National song, of all other, holds a powerful sway over the minds of those in whom it awakens thoughts of fatherland and freedom. What would be the poetry of any nation, or any age, if robbed of the spirit of its song ? What would be left of Scottish character if the ballads of the Caledonian bards were swept away ? if the harps of the minstrels perished with the fingers that first swept them ? The song that cheered the shepherd boy while tending his sheep, comes back to him in the hour of oppression and danger; and even upon the battle- field, that melody calls up the moors and mountains of his native land ; the wild woods and the streams come back, and the breezy freshness of the heather fans his cheek again, as he marches with a firm step and a nervous arm to win his liberty or die. It is said that he who writes the songs of a nation may at the same time predict its history, for patriotism has ever burned the brighter when music fanned the flame, and the human breast has ever throbbed with a holier devotion when the soul of song was stirring at the heart strings. The same tender emotions which move the camel- driver to sing to his camel, as he shares with the patient brute his dates and barley-bread, and then ceases in his 142 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. song to hear the tinkling of the bells upon the desert sand, animated the harper in the olden times when he poured forth his wild songs to nerve the chieftain's arm for battle. No music is there like the human voice : harmony may flow from trembling strings ; but the soul of song dwells sweetest on the human lips. It was in musical sentences that Pythagoras uttered those wonderful spondees by which he could suddenly pacify a man that was in a violent transport of anger ; and in the simple ballad sung to-day at the fireside, the heart finds one of its sweetest consolations, and learns a sym- pathy which for ever links it in memory \vith home. Virgil knew the value and the beauty of the voice when he made Silenus sing of the Epicurean birthday, and in a strain so thrilling that " Tripping satyrs crowded to the song ; And sylvan fauns, and savage beasts advanced, And nodding forests to the numbers danced." And there are but few who could sit listless while the lips of beauty were uttering the language of a tender ballad a ballad of the heart, woven of home joys and sorrows not the jingle of a heartless and abandoned fancy. Oh, the magic of that tender touch ! the thrill of that utterance of soul for soul the glorious circle of associa- tions kindled into being by the music of those household words by which our mothers sang us to sleep, by which our sweethearts beguiled the evenings of our wooing, and by which, as age and trouble gather around us, we hope to have for solace in the downward path ! The finishing touch the completion of the household circle is this fire-side song; enjoyed but once, it is THE SOUL OF SONG. 143 remembered for ever, and as a frequent pastime it is the purest and most refining antidote to the gilded allure- ments of gaiety and fashion. Picture the Christmas group sitting round the hearth of blazing logs, where the flames leap up, and up, and flash their ruddy radi- ance on the ruddier walls, playing in strange sparkles and gold drops on the old cornices, and leaving a strange Christmas light upon every happy face assem- bled there. The song is all that is needed to complete their joy, and that scene, completed by the fireside song, becomes a memory to each one there which none of the detergent vanities of the world will ever annihilate. There can be no limit to the moral beauty of this. Everything which refines the home, which makes it attractive, which endears it by spells and enchantments, and words of love, and songs of gladness, has an effect which abides through life, and gives force and reality to the domestic character, and which makes home a haven of refuge from the storms and whirlwinds of the world. Who, but the most abandoned and outcast, can for a moment picture such a scene without calling up from his own circle of associations a hundred memories of dear ones that have passed away, of others that still linger linger as if only to love the joys of the world having all passed from them ; and of others yet in the bloom and flush of life, stepping one by one into the circles of manhood and womanhood, to be cheered by-and-by with the prattle and the songs of their own babes, and to know how truly home is home when cheered by the breath of song. The object of the ballad is to stir the feelings by a 144 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. gentle appeal, and to lift the heart into its highest region of sympathy and moral beauty, by the blending into one harmonious whole of the simple things around it. The Old Arm-chair ; Oh, Nannie; and the Evening Bells, have kindled more pure aspirations and left dearer memories behind than all the morceaux of the Trench and Italian masters that ever were introduced into the boudoir. The ballad is essentially the song of home; its appeals are direct, and it plays upon the emotions by a rhyming of the things that are near and dear to us. Happy the child whose first sleep is softened by a mother's song ; happy the mother who sings her child to sleep ! Happy the home where music supplants the attractions of the tavern and the gambling-table ; happy the bride who loves the wedding bells for their own sake, and mingles with the first cares of the wife a song to win her husband's kisses for "domestic happiness is of that quiet nature which the heart enjoys .but the tongue boasts not, it is like that still music which the ancients supposed is going on above not the less sweet for its making no noise in the ears of this world." 145 THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE. A TEACHING OF THE AQUARIUM. IN the vast procession of beings which passes before the eyes of God as a panorama, and of which man catches but imperfect glimpses here and there, the many which drop out of the ranks into the jaws of death form the tesselated pavement on which the successive races tread, secure in their perpetuity. Life stands in fear of death, though death is but its servant a faithful servant appointed by the Author of life to gather life's tangled threads into an order of successive developments. The dying Christian may fear death, though assured of immortality; and the unthinking worm writhes in its expiring agonies, as if it would by a last effort struggle into strength once more. .Deeply hid in the core of the organic universe is the secret of Death, " who keeps the keys of all the creeds ; " yet man is permitted to read a part of the mystery in the experiences of his kind, and in the records of past ages. He doubts the fact of death, while openly admitting it ; for his fear dictates a thought directly opposed to reason, to observation, and to the knowledge that has been revealed 146 BRAMBLES Afll> BAY LEAVES. " He thinks he was not born to die, And THOU hast made him, Thou art just." Yet when man looks upon Nature, he sees everywhere the records of death's work among the representatives of creative energy. The stratified rocks are but the tomb- stones in the great graveyard of the world ; they cover the bones of a million generations, and the inscription on them is, " The dust we tread upon was once alive." If the infusion of life into countless forms, each in itself perfect, needed nothing less than Almighty power, it needed Almighty power too to complete the scheme in the institution of dissolution ; and the grim king of terrors, before whom the bee and the sparrow tremble, perhaps, not less than man, became co-worker with God by a wise and beneficent appointment : and so the orders of being began, and have to this hour continued, as a series of dissolving views, in which there is no hiatus, but only change ; no shifting of the focus or the screen, no aber- ration or intermission of the source of light, but an unending variety in the pictures. We know not how other worlds may fare, but this we know, that here death supplies from every extinguished picture the colours with which the next are painted, and we live man and brute on the debris of the past. I see all this and more in the aquarium ; it teaches me lessons in physics, and, I trust, also teaches me that the moral and spiritual truths of the universe may be illus- trated, sometimes explained, by a patient study of the commonest things. The aquarium is a world in little ; it sustains itself. For the moment, I put aside the law of gravity as a universal law, and the presence of the THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE. 147 atmosphere as a universal thing, and I call it a world, needing no aid for its continuance and the perfect adjust- ment of its balance of power from external things. I take a vessel of glass, a few pebbles, a few pieces of sand- stone rock, and a sufficiency of water, and to that I commit my fishes and insects, and say, " There is your world; the order of nature is such, that you may henceforth live and die without human interference/' I say nothing here of the details of management; I am looking for instruction in the laws of life and death. The two requisites of animal life, food and air, must be generated in this world, or it ceases to instruct me ; yet the water contains but little of each, and whence is its supply to come? God has ordained such a wealth of organic forms, that wherever the conditions of life are found, life takes possession of the spot, whether it be the bottom of the ocean, the dripping roof of a cave, the expanse of the viewless air, or the mimic lake I call an aquarium. Forthwith the dead stones become alive with greenness, the glass walls assume the semblance of a meadow, the milky hue of the water disappears as the earthy particles it held in solution subside, and the light that streams through it takes a tint of greenness. There is an order of vegetation appointed to occupy such sites, and almost every non-metallic, and some metallic sub- stances too, become speedily coated with confervae, when their surfaces are kept moist a sufficient length of time. Were it not so, the inhabitants of my world must perish ; and to prove the fact I try an experiment. I place some fishes in a clean vessel of water, without pebbles L 2 143 BRAMBLES ASTD BAT LEAVES. and without rock; the moment the first dim bronzy speck appears, I rub it oft 7 the glass, and so thwart the course of Nature. The fishes soon exhaust the water of its oxygen, and though the water attempts to renew its supplies by absorption from the atmosphere, the compen- sation is too slow, the fishes come gasping to the sur- face, and in a short while perish. Even then I learn something from their death, if I leave the vessel in the hands of Nature. Death has no sooner spread his black banner over my household gods than life of another kind arises to confound him, and the microscope reveals to me myriads of animals and plants, and organisms that seemingly occupy an inter- mediate place between the two great kingdoms, rioting upon the wreck that death has made. My half-dozen dead fishes have given birth to existences numerous as the stars in heaven, or as the sand upon the sea-shore, innumerable. While these devour the banquet death has spread for them, while forests of confervoid threads rise in silken tufts like microscopic savannahs, Nature is passing portions of the ichthyic debris through her laboratory, and the very source of life for which they pined and perished oxygen is poured in in large measure, and the corruption is quickly changed to sweet ness. Of the once sportive fishes some portions have become air, other portions have become water, but the chief of their bulk lives already in the vegetation which hides their grave, and the moving throng with which that vegetation is peopled. God's purpose in the work- ing of the "laws in obedience to which these changes have taken place, is manifestly to keep ever true that balance THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE. 149 of life and death of which He holds the beam in His own hands. But my aquarium which has not thus been interfered with, presents already a similar scene of life and bustle. When first supplied, the milky-looking water was abun- dantly full of gaseous matters, and every part of the rough rockwork was, for a time, studded with silvery globules. The fishes consumed all that in the process of breathing. As the water passed through their gills the oxygen was absorbed ; that oxygen, by a process of refined chemistry, and perhaps by the help of iron also, gave their gills a bright red colour, gave their blood its red colour too, and by other processes not less refined, sustained the balance of life's functions within them, for without it they must perish. We believe that not the airiest particle of earth, atmosphere, or water, nor the most minute globule of condensed moisture, or the most infinitesimal point of meteoric dust, can ever be lost, at least during Time, from the fabric of the universe. My fishes tell me that the oxygen they absorb from the water, they again return to it, but in another form. They mspire oxygen and orpire carbonic acid, just as a man does, and every other living creature that moveth upon the face of all the earth. Is it within the reach of human power, even when reason, imagination, and fancy combine together as a bold triad to look direct upon a fact, to appreciate that principle of terrestrial life by which animal and vegetable organisms reciprocally labour to maintain the balance of atmospheric purity ? The carbonic acid given off by the animal is poison to it, if it accumulate while the supply of oxygen is cut short. 150 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. It was carbonic acid as much as absence of oxygen that killed our fishes just now, for though inhabitants of water they were not the less suffocated. Therefore I see why, in the tank that has been left alone, plants have cast anchor on the glass walls, the brown pebbles, and the gray blocks of sandstone rock. My fishes breathe, and breathe. If their numbers are properly propor- tioned to the area they occupy, they will never exhaust the water of oxygen, never render it fetid with carbonic acid, so long as one necessity of vegetable life light is allowed to use its active influence to paint the plants green, even as oxygen gives a sanguine hue to the gills or lungs of the fishes. To those plants the carbonic acid which the fishes expire day and night, is as essential as oxygen is to the animal economy ; and thus, without introducing a single scrap of any living plant, the balance is sustained, and death seems to be kept at a distance. If at first I threw in a tuft of callitriche or anacharis, or any other true aquatic vegetable, oxygen would be supplied abundantly ; and in practice it might be well to begin so, because some little time elapses ere the seeds of the microscopic forest, the tops of whose trees present to the eye but a felt-like coating of superficial greenness, are developed into true plants ; though with a fair amount of indirect daylight, and at certain seasons of the year, a few hours suffice to set the vegetative process, with all its proper consequences, in full action. Many of the readers of this paper will call to mind the aqua- rium that stands in my entrance hall. It contains twenty fishes large and small, and not a single scrap of vegetation except what has been developed in situ by THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE. 151 spontaneous generation. It is five years since that was fitted and stocked, and committed to the manage- ment of Nature, with the sole exception of the external aid afforded by regular supplies of food for its inmates, which need not be taken account of, now that we are considering it as a world in which the balance of life and death is sustained by the operation of principles ordained by the Creator. It is when we leave the principles, and attempt to classify the details of the scheme, that we become bewildered. The smooth revolution of the flywheel and the noiseless oscillation of the piston, convince the un- professional observer of a great engine, that mechanical motions are possessed of poetry ; but if he would analyze the relations of the cog-wheels, the indications of the " governor/' the " gauge," and the pressure- valve, he must descend to hard facts, and forget for a while the sublime suggestions of a system of mechanism that throbs like a living creature. Admit a full glare of summer sun to the aquarium, and forthwith the water loses its pellucid fluidity, and becomes deeply tinged throughout of a dull green, as if some pigment had been dissolved in it. Instead of plants attached to stones and glass only, and animals that float unseen, the whole of the water is occupied by visible masses of animal and vegetable life ; and if the fishes suffer, it will be from undue heat, not from the addition to the element in which they live of this new mass of being. Shut out the sunshine, let the fresh air play over the surface of the water, let moderate daylight stream through it as before, and speedily the green fog clears away, the water again becomes trans- 152 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. parent, and the balance is restored. Monas, euglena, uvella, cryptomonas, gonium, and other wondrous in- fusoria, may be detected as constituents of the cloudy mass while it lasts, called into being because the con- ditions of the tank were such as they required ; as if life in embryo was everywhere locked up until the moment came for its liberation, and some particular circum- stance was the talisman to set it free ; or if we consider created forms to be marshalled in grand procession, may we not expect that every tribe will hurry to its appointed place the instant that a door is opened ? Microscopists have long been at war, but without bloodshed, as to the place to be assigned to certain organic forms which are hidden from our common eye- sight. While the war goes on as to whether desmidiacae and diatomacea& be animal or vegetable, or both, let facts suffice us here in the study of the aquarium. Does an animal exhale carbonic acid ? Yes. Well, here are plants or animals, concerned in keeping up the balance, which exhale oxygen, and their name is legion. Volvox globator and the bacillariae labour as hard to supply the fishes with the life-sustaining gas as do the silken threads of verdure that line the glass like a carpet. Is the possession of starch a distinctive feature of the vegetable ? Perhaps so. Truly here are desmidiacae that contain starch, and if I make the possession of cilia the test for assigning certain forms to the animal king- dom, I find in the aquarium spores of algae furnished with them. Motion I know to be no test, because algae spores dance through the water gaily till they find a resting-place, and when the aquarium was first filled, THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE 153 it was by dancing they at last found where to pitcli their tents, and cease their nomad wanderings. But they all work together to sustain the balance, and the law of "give and take" prevails amongst them the stentor devours the oscillatoriae, rotatoria, and monads, and the hydras swallow all ; every darting speck is a tomb where- in some smaller speck of life is to be buried, and life thus prospers on the decay it is itself undergoing. But all this while a fine deposit slowly settles among the pebbles, which form the lower stratum of this watery world. Between the stones a fine alluvial silt collects and thickens. The first frost, sufficiently severe to touch the tank, causes the whole green coating to peel off from the glass and rock, and while this subsides, to add to the thickness of the alluvium how slightly, and yet how sufficiently for an example of Nature's working ! a new growth commences, and that balance is restored. Do you not see that the chief teaching of geology the piling of stratum upon stratum, the conversion of dis- rupted rock and decayed plant and animal into rock again is here exemplified in the history of a domestic toy, which contains already one example of stratification in the silence of watery submergence ? A tank which has been fitted with loam, pebbles, and plants of the brook and river, will, if left undisturbed for three years,, be in this state. Those plants will all have decayed, but there will be an abundant spontaneous vegetation. The accumulations of that short period will have settled into a close mass, almost as hard as stone ; and if fishes have died in the meantime, and have not been removed, their bones will be found overlaid with hardened mud, just 154 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. as we find them in the old red sandstone, or the chalk, or the carboniferous rocks, and shall we not call them our own fossils ? See again in this case in which death has been very busy (for plants of large growth soon perish in the absence of sunshine, and occasional attendant accidents will carry off some of the finny pets), how life has been equally active on the other side, for such an aquarium will be a hundred times richer in those spontaneous growths we have already spoken of, and visible forms of infusoria and true zoophytes will abound, and every class will be more fully represented, down even to the twilight monad. Though this paper must have an end, there is no end to the teaching of the aquarium. It is a watery microcosm of living and dead wonders, and we need not marvel that the balance of life and death may be observed in its succession of changes, because all the physical forces of the universe are locked up within a single bead of dew, and all the functions of organic creation are comprised in the economy of monas termo. If God so ordains that life shall be constantly soaring from the tomb, if the story of the Phoenix ceases to be a fable, need man, the victim of doubts and fears, ever fail in his trust of that blessed promise, that " this mortal shall put on im- mortality, and this corruptible shall put on incorruption?" Science may fix his mind on the appreciation of God's wisdom and power as he reads the handwriting of the Almighty in Nature, but through faith in another reve- lation must he hope to exclaim, triumphantly, "0 death, where is thy sting ? grave, where is thy victory ?" Or, to pass from divine to human consolations, we may THE MYSTERIOUS BALANCE. 155 take up the apostrophe of the great Baleigh, and say, " O eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! what none have dared, thou hast done ; what none have attempted, thou hast accomplished ; thou hast gathered all the might, majesty, and meanness of mankind, and hast covered them with these two words, ' hie jacet.' " Nature's children have a dread of death, but Nature herself is in friendly compact with the master of silence. If the types, which are the ideas of God, have survived from the oldest rocks to this present hour, will not the spirit, which lives on ideas, and evolves them as the aquarium evolves its throng of animalcules, live for ever ? It is not hard to believe with Tennyson : " That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete." 156 THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. " There's not one atom of yon earth But once was living man ; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in the thinnest cloud, But flowed in. human veins," SHELLS v. So pass and change the elements of the world. So separate and combine, so decay and revivify, so come and go the creatures of the earth and air, and in due time all the particles of the rounded world pass through the life current of the human, heart. Nature is a great laboratory, a necromantic palace of mutation. Yet out of all this passing and repassing, this flitting and fading of her dead and living children, she still preserves the old familiar face, and looks upon us with the same sweet mother's smile which gladdened the hearts of the old thinkers, and cheered the builders of the ancient temples. Nature has but a few simple materials, and neither crucible nor alembic in which to elaborate her new forms, and yet with this poverty of means does she trick out all the world in scenes of delicious beauty, and hedge round tne waking thoughts of men with wonder upon wonder. " The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 157 bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells ; the addi- tion of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms ; and yet so poor is Nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Com- pound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties."* When men woke up from barbarism and night, and began to contemplate the beauty of the world, they saw that amid the multiplicity of colours and of forms, and in the endless metamorphoses of things around them, whether they looked upon the granite peaks piercing the blue heaven with their hoary pinnacles; the wild sea with its midnight moans and summer laughter ; the blue heaven with its storms and starlight beauty; or the green earth with its clustering woods and waving grasses, blossoming all over from pole to pole with a garment of living verdure ; still the same invisible forces were at jeork, weaving all things in a web of unity, and connect- ing the most incongruous things together. Hence, in their mystic worship, and in the poetic utterances of their untamed hearts, they pictured nature under the various forms of Buddha, Vishnu, Osiris, Proteus, and Pan ; all of them symbols of the same thought, and representing the creative power which for ever and ever transmutes one form into another, and evokes from * " Emerson's Essays," Second Series, p. 121. 158 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. corruption and death the creatures of a new creation. The story of the Phoenix is the story of the world, and as one form crumbles into ashes, another starts from its dust, to continue the chain of beauty, and push on the series of utilities. " Where is the dust that has not been alive ? The spade, the plough disturb our ancestors ; From human mould we reap our daily bread ; The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons : O'er devastation we blind revels keep ; Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel." YOUNG. Of the sixty simple elements td which all the varieties of dead and living matter are reducible, some fifteen or twenty play the chief parts in the chemistry of the world. All the phenomena which take place around us, whether it be the upheaval of volcanic masses, or the floating of a gossamer in the summer air ; the sweeping hurricane which tears up forests by the roots, or the blushing promise of the spring's first flowers ; the forked light- ning, and the tramping thunder which shakes heaven with deep pulsations, or the golden belts upon the body of the bee, and the fairy song he chants among the flowers j the trickling of molten metals into the fissures of the earth, or the passage of an idea through the brain of man ; are dependent upon the separation and re-com- bination of various of these elementary principles ; with- out the movements or metamorphoses of which, the whole world would be one scene of darkness and desola- tion. Chemical laws operate upon the minute atoms of THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 159 which bodies are composed; and as all the atoms of matter have a spherical or globular form, the attractions and repulsions of atomic particles exhibit a close analogy to the attractions and repulsions of the worlds. It is possible, indeed, that there is but one attraction and one chemical law, and the phenomenon of an atom may be repeated in the dewdrop, in the bubble on the stream, and in the floating world. There is more poetry in the alembic and the test tube than the worldly dream about. In one direction the earnest workers are probing the secrets of Nature, and unravelling one by one the mystic threads that run through all her fabrications; and in another, poet-minds are arranging and diffusing the facts which the former have made known, that all the world may become inheritors of the new possession, and dwell with increased joy on the contemplation of these new treasures of the Almighty's handiwork.* If we trace back the history of our world into those remote eras of which the early rocks are records, we shall discover that the same chemical laws were operating then which control the changes of matter now. At one period the earth was a huge mass of fiery fluid, which, radiating or throwing off heat into space, gradually cooled, and became surrounded with a solid crust, entombing within itself a mere chaos of intensely heated materials, which now assert their existence in the shock * " The Chemistry of the Seasons." By J. Griffiths, Author of " The Chemistry of the Four Elements," Chemical Lecturer to the Koyal Family. London : John Churchill. " Chemistry, as exemplifying the Wisdom and Beneficence of God " By George Fownes. Ibid. 100 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. of the earthquake, and the awful outbreaks of volcanic fires. In later ages, when the crust had cooled still more, and the atmosphere let fall its showers, the still heated surface, hissing and roaring with the contact of the flood, was rent into enormous blocks, and dreadful abysses ; which still remain all over the world, and form the wondrous monuments of an age of great convulsions. Later still the seas gathered together, the rocky masses were powdered into dust by the delicate fingers of the dew and the shower, the green herbs sprang up, and the monsters of the slimy deep appeared in obedience to the Creator's fiat, and the whole earth became a home of beauty in obedience to chemical law. The ceaseless play of the elements, and the mutations of the atoms, had built up the whole into one gorgeous scene of luxurious- ness ; and man was awakened into being to render the whole subservient to his wishes, and by tracing out the harmonies of the natural world, to arrive at a more exalted knowledge of his Maker. The atom of charcoal which floated in the corrupt atmosphere of the old volcanic ages, was absorbed into the leaf of a fern when the valleys became green and luxuriant ; and there, in its proper place, it received the sunlight and the dew, aiding to fling back to heaven a reflection of heaven's gold ; and at the same time to build the tough fibre of the plant. That same atom was consigned to the tomb when the waters submerged the jungled valleys. It had lain there thousands of years, and a month since was brought into the light again, imbedded in a block of coal. It shall be consumed to warm our dwelling, cook our food, and make more THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 161 ruddy and cheerful the hearth whereon our children play ; it shall combine with a portion of the invisible atmosphere, ascend upward as a curling wreath to revel in a mazy dance high up in the blue ether ; shall reach earth again, and be entrapped in the embrace of a flower ; shall live in velvet beauty on the cheek of the apricot ; shall pass into the human body, giving enjoy- ment to the palate, and health to the blood ; shall circu- late in the delicate tissues of the brain ; and aid, by entering into some new combination, in educing the thoughts which are now being uttered by the pen. It is but an atom of charcoal, it may dwell one moment in a stagnant ditch, and the next be flushing on the lip of beauty ; it may now be a component of a limestone rock, and the next an ingredient in a field of potatoes ; it may slumber for a thousand years without undergoing a single change, and the next hour pass through a thousand; and after all, it is only an atom of charcoal, and occupies only its own place wherever it may be. It is from the unceasing interchange of the particles of matter that the living lustre of the world is born ; it is the separation of one atom of water from one atom of starch which gives rise to the formation of sugar ; and to this change, produced by the mutual influences of warmth and moisture, the germination of all seeds is due, and hence the continuance of vegetation. Neither the oaks of the forest, nor the grasses of the field, could ever have burst into their green beauty but for this simple change in the elements of their seeds.* The Seeds contain a large quantity of starch, a material best of all suited to resist the destroying influences to which seeds are sub- JI 162 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. maltster takes advantage of this, to produce that delicate flavour in the barley which, when combined with the intoxicating product of a second change in the sugar itself, has proved the source of physical suffering and social misery to millions. If the imaginings of the early world were brilliant and startling, the facts of modern chemists are embued with a poetry more lofty still, while they have for their basis the solid ground of truth, and stand separated by a wide gulf from the phantasies of fiction. What Oriental picture of aeriel temples, or rainbow daughters of the sky, can for a moment be compared with the simple chemistry of the atmosphere, or the rainbows themselves ? This soft, universal, azure medium in which the round world swings, and which holds the clouds in its arms, letting them fall drop by drop in fatness to the earth, or that spanning archway of the angels, formed by millions of separate particles of rain, each particle a prism, which cuts up the rays of light into separate parts, and explains their anatomy and their colours ? What fable of old can stand side by side with the fact that " Each drop of water is a world, containing Creatures more numerous than the men of earth ; The April shower upon the green tree raining, To fresh creations in each leaf gives birth : Nature, her balance everywhere regaining, New breathing things to form, leaves nothing dearth, Spitzbergen's ice and Afric's sandy field To Nature's living mass their tribute yield?" ject ; but which the young plant is unable to absorb into its tissues ; hence the necessity, during germination, for its conversion into sugar. THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 163 No ! there is more wonder in truth than fable ; more poetry in fact than fiction. But there are revelations of this wonder-world of change more startling than these, and perhaps more truly poetic. The most obdurate and inflexible bodies seem destined by a law of their nature to work their way up through successive orders of being, till they reach the highest of them all; and when there, to fill a purpose essential to the very existence of man himself. Thus, without phosphorus, and sulphur, and potash, and lime, the human frame would be destitute of outline and power of locomotion, for with these materials its bones are formed; so also, without a supply of common salt, which is a compound of a brilliant metal and a poisonous gas, the alkaline character of the blood could not be maintained, and the frame would soon fall into corrup- tion, and perish ; and in like manner, without iron the identical metal of which ploughshares and steam-engines are formed life could not be sustained even for the shortest space of time ; for, by the presence of the metal in the globules of the blood, that fluid maintains its brilliancy of colour, and is enabled to take up the vital- izing atoms of the air, and so continue the enjoyments of a happy existence. While still more wonderful, perhaps, are those discoveries by which Liebig has rendered himself immortal, and which reveal to us the chemical phenomena involved in the operations of the brain, and which indicate that the amount of phosphorus and nitrogenous principles, removed continually from the nervous system, are in direct proportion to the intensity and continuance of thought, and which M 2 1C4 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. point to the immediate relation of the material to the spiritual. Passing from these things to matters less directly associated with the phenomena of life, we find beauty still predominant, and poetry of the most lofty character the presiding idea. A dark surface absorbs more heat than a light one ; at the same time it radiates or parts with heat more rapidly than a light surface. The chemist exposes the backs of his hands to the noonday sun ; the one bare, and the other covered with a black cloth. The uncovered hand will be at a temperature of from 85 to 90 degrees, and the covered one at from 98 to 106 degrees. The black colour absorbs about 15 per cent, more heat than the white one, and yet the covered hand is uninjured, while the other is scorched and blistered ; in this way, although apparently in oppo- sition to the result required, has God provided for His children who dwell under the fierce heat of the southern sun. He has made them black, that they may live in harmony with the golden sunshine above them, and not as the objects of the white man's tyranny, when he for- gets his God, and darkens the green wilderness with the shadow of a devil. There is poetry in such facts as these; and when the human mind has achieved for itself a nobler inheritance of wisdom than it now possesses, and true genius takes the place of commercial craft, we shall find the poet and the painter combining to do honour to the men by whose labours these wonderful truths have been unfolded. The picture of Faraday turning a ray of light from its course by the power of a magnet, under the direction of THE POETRY OP CHEMISTRY. ]65 his own poet-mind, will be looked upon with profound reverence ; and the names of Davy, Liebig, Berzelius, and Dumas, will adorn the poetical annals of generations now waiting to be born. The same scrutinizing power which detects ozone in the atmosphere, and in this way accounts for the peculiar odour of the electric spark; which traces out the analogy between that same atmo- sphere and nitric acid ; which discovers the method of converting old rags into sugar, and sawdust into bread ; which detects the service of the humble moss in cleaving and crumbling the rugged rocks on which it chances to grow, by means of the oxalic acid which its roots contain; which observes the effect of sunlight in elaborating the juices of the fruits, and makes the same sunlight a painter of pictures; which compounds a material which acts as an antidote to pain, and proves one of the greatest of auxiliaries in the service of humanity, under the name of chloroform; which not only finds Tongues in trees, Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones ;" but travels up " Through the measureless fields, Where the silver moon and the comet wheels," and measures the magnitude of those lamps of God; will deal with higher than physical things, and learn to attach its sympathies with a moral law; securing for itself a nobler salvation than from the choke-damp of a mine, and inheriting a purer religion than the worship of organic compounds. 166 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. Meantime, the elements wait on man, and combine to do him service ; he has made matter subservient to his will, and in this conquest of the material by the imma- terial, the world reads the idea of its advancing humanity. The lesson is one which humbles, because it points to a dependence on God, and suggests that there are regions into which the mind will yet have to enter to learn its spiritual duties, and connect them with its conquest of the world. " In whatever light we consider these matters, the argument of benevolent design and contrivance, deduced from the obvious facts themselves, remains unaltered. The care and beneficence of the Creator is not less shown in the connexion He has established between physical and moral health. The labour which a man is obliged to exert to procure for himself the necessaries of life, is not less essential to the maintenance of a healthy tone of mind than of a sound and active condition of the bodily organism. No evil can be greater than the rust, alike of body and soul, which results from inactivity. The state of labour is the very condition of enjoyment ; not, indeed, the excessive and slavish toil to which a very large portion of mankind have, by a most unfortunate combina- tion of circumstances, been reduced ; but that moderate and well-regulated labour of mind and body which conduces so much to the welfare of both, and which would be, under more favourable auspices, fully sufficient to impart comfort and abundance to all. If men only knew and felt how inseparably their own individual happiness is connected with the welfare and prosperity of their species ; if those who have intellect and power, THE POETRY OP CHEMISTRY. 167 and wealth at their disposal, could only be persuaded to thrust aside the petty jealousies and cares, the idle parade and prejudices of society, and join heart and hand in the great work of human improvement, how much might be effected ! How much happier, and how much better all might become, if a sound and universal spirit of philanthropy were once awakened, capable of embracing within its pale all orders and conditions of men: considering them as they really are, the children of one common Parent, bound together by the ties of brotherhood, each having a special duty assigned to him to perform, not independently of, but in conjunc- tion with the rest, and exciting all to render each other mutual assistance in surmounting the difficulties and trials of this life of discipline and pupilage/' * * Fcrvvnes. 108 MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. * I am seat with broome before To sweep the dust behind the doore." Midsummer Night's Dream, SUNSHINE prosper thee, sweet lady-birch! Softest of dews and holiest of showers fall upon thy tasselled sprays and trembling foliage, and ruddiest of morning glances break upon thy silver bark ! And thou, bonny broom, hiding thyself in the moorland hollows, how many belted bees have visited thy ringlets since the spring began ? how many wanderers hath thy perfume solaced ? over how many aching heads hast thou shook thy rushy branches, hushing the lone wayfarer into Elysian dreams as he lay on the pliant moss beneath thee ? It is in the greenest of glens and the mossiest of woody nooks that broomstaffs flourish, on the healthiest of wild moorlands that the bonny broom comes to birth. Blue and golden flowers watch over them in infancy, and bearded oaks bend above their lusty youth. A broomstick! Are " proper people " shocked at the suggestion to them of the vileness and scullery refuse which the broom is used to sweep away ? No matter what is mere fuel to them shall be philosophy to us ; and with the reverent, MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 169 stump of a superannuated besom before us, we will let the caprice have its course, and see for once what sug- gestions may come from a broomstick. Were you ever young? of course you were, and made your first triumph before family friends by trotting, full speed, into the midst of little Jemima's muslin friends astride a broomstick, and had at least a hundred kisses from dear old Granny, who sat in the corner, and vowed it was vulgar to trot broomsticks in doors, while she secretly loved you all the more for it. There, too, was the old Captain, in his skull-cap, and barnacles, and purple nose, who gloried in a romp, and yet, for fear of offending the young ladies, suffered innumerable pangs when he said, "Charley, you're a naughty boy, sir!" "Well, that day has blended with the mists of memory, and the broomstick is the only talisman to summon its pictures to the present. " : From the age That children tread the worldly stage, Broomstaff, or poker, they bestride, And round the parlour love to ride." PKIOB. The broomstick went the way of all toys petted to- day, burnt to-morrow ; and to avenge the degradation inflicted upon it then, its ghost came back to us at school, inflicting stripes, and, in the compound of fools- cap and pickled birch, torturing the affections as well as the flesh, and making youth's season of song and sun- shine one of wailings and tears. The pickled birch how barbarous in itself, and still more barbarous in its frequent and uutimed use, marking more the phases 170 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. of the teacher's temper than the dulness of the pupil's mind. Stupid old doctrine ! to imagine that what the mind was incapable of grasping could be beaten into the body that to make an impression on the memory, blood must trickle from the skin. Well, that time has past also, and memory seems to hallow even those barbari- ties ; and we catch sight of the modern cane, so sparingly used by men who have adopted love as an element of education in the place of the old sottish spite. When we see that, we sometimes imagine that things have sadly degenerated since we went to school, for to us now the pickled birch is a thing of poetry, if it be the poetry of pain, while the cane is mere prose, and suggestive of sugar-candy at the high st. But the birch has its moral for after life, " As fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch. Onely to sticke it in their children's sight For terror, not to use ; in time the rod, More mocked than feared." Measure for Neature. It is a serious question how far principle actuates us to duty rather than fear of consequences. We are, perhaps, little better than schoolboys, and feel the moral birch of the world, and the stripes of conscience, in more cases than we love its tasks and burdens : - " But though no more his brow severe, nor dread Of birchen sceptre awes my riper age, A sterner tyrant rises to my view, With deadlier weapon armed." JAOO, Edge Hill, b. iii. But leaving private experience, which lacks largeness MEDITATIONS 6* A BROOMSTICK. 171 and universality, let us take this crippled stump, worn as it is to a mere shadow in the service of that which is next to godliness. It was once a comely, upright, lusty broom, with a stout birchen body, and a green bushy head ; and though ever standing with its one leg in the air, yet always ready to be useful, and run the risk of apoplexy for the service of a good cause. Its wretched stump, now reduced to the last extremity of vegetable suffering, was, in time gone by, a waving branch of lady-birch, and was clothed in silver bark, and tasselled over with delicate twigs and little fairy leaves. When spring came, it danced to and fro in the sunlight, and its shadow glided up and down the white ledges of the rocks, over which its pensile sprays peeped to see the water trickle down the ravine. Glorious was the lady- birch at any season; glorious, too, the hale green broom ; the one gleaming in the morning sun, where the wood- pigeon built her nest, the other dressing the stony moor with yellow livery, and both living to make the world more beautiful. It is this birch* which supplies the best of wood for broomsticks, and whose young feathery branches often take the place of the green broom in the completion of the besom. In the Highlands they use it for tanning, for dyeing wool yellow ; its bark supplies Highland candles and Norway bread ; its wood, charcoal and printers' ink; its leaves, fodder for horses, kine, sheep, and goats; and its seed, food for that pretty BIBCH Celt., betu; A. S. hire; Dutch, berJce; German berkan, birchcnbaum; Fr., bouteau; Ital.betulla. Pliny, I. 16, e. 18 speaks of the mirabilis candor of the birch. " It showetb wonderful white," says Holland. 172 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. songster of the wood, the aberdevine. The sap of the birch makes the birch-wine of English housewifery, of which those who know how to make it are not a little proud : " And though she boasts no charms divine, Yet she can make and serve hirch-wine." WARTOJJ. It will flourish in English woods, and there is not a wood worth rambling in which has not many of these light, fairy creatures, pencilling the sky with their trembling, spidery network of leaves and branches. It was this same birch from which the Gauls extracted bitumen, and which the Russians now use to prepare the celebrated Russian leather; which the carpenter finds best of all wood for rafters, ploughs, spades, and carts ; which the Highland peasants use for harness, ropes, and basket-work, and with which they symbolize, under the name of Betu or am leatha, the clan of the Buchanans. It is the same birch as that from which our poor imbecile stump was cut, which forms the great forests of the North ; which climbs up rugged mountain-sides, to peep over the precipices, and fling the light of vegetable grace and beauty over the giant solitudes of snow. It is the same birch which fills us with forest lore when we see its silvery stem towering up, straight as an arrow, to the sky, and waving its plumes of pensile beauty in the sunlight. The bonny broom,* BROOM A. S. brom; Ger. besen; D. beren, from D. bremmen, because the seeds when ripe, burst from the pods with considerable noiae. Ital. tcoye garnatc; Sp. escobat ; Bus. metlii. MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 173 " Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed, Her blossoms " used by the good housewives of old to brush the crumbs from the dressing-board, and the soiled sand from the kitchen floor, is no less dear for its touches of memory, and pictures of green imagery, than the lady-birch. Jt grows on the moorland, where there is no shelter from the blast of winter or the fierce heat of summer ; where drought, and swamp, and keenest frost have each unmiti- gated vigour, and where the earth lies flat beneath the blue sky, as if it had fallen prostrate, and had no friend but the broom to cover it with garments. It is on the dreary waste where the red deer loves to wander, and the ptarmigan finds a home, that the bonny broom sprinkle? its round tufts of green, fresh as infancy amid tho fiercest frost golden as day -break through the laughing summer. There it creeps up and down the hills, and amid the wild forest dells, far away from the haunta of men, in company of creeping things, of gaps of sun- shine, and of passing shadows. " There lacked no floure to my dome, Ne not so much as floure of brome." CHAUCER. * In yonder greenwood blows the broom ; Shepherds, we'll trust our flocks to stray, Court Nature in her sweetest bloom, And steal from Care one summer day."* It was the rushy branches of the broom which sup- Langhorne, "The Wilding and the Broom.'' 174 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. plied the old Greeks with ropes and cordage ; * which now provides the " simple sheep " with the best of food, the cattle with the best of litter, the cottager with the best of thatch (He made carpenters to make the houses and lodgynges of great tymbre, and set the houses like stretes, and covered them with rede and brome, so that it was lyke a lyttel towne. FBOISSAKT.) and the wild bee with the most delicious honey. It is the bonny broom which serves us as well whether we cut its tufts for sweeping, for tanning leather, or for the manufacture of coarse cloth j which is almost as useful as hops in brewing ; which furnishes a wood capable of the most exquisite polish ; which, in its ashes, gives a pure alkali, and in its pods and blossoms, perfume and medicine. Dr. Cullen and Mead both esteemed the broom in cases of dropsy. " E'en humhle broom and osiers have their use, And shade for sheep and food for flocks produce." It was the bonny broom which the Scottish clan of the Forbes wore in their bonnets when they wished to arouse the heroism of their chieftains, and which, in their Gaelic dialect, they called bealadh, in token of its beauty. It was this very broom from which the long line of Plantagenets took their name, and which to the last they wore on their helmets, crests, and family seal. It was thus : Fulke, Earl of Anjou, having committed a crime, was enjoined by a holy father of the church, Spartium, from svaprov, cordage. Genista spartium has thick- Bet rush -like twigs, very tough and fibrous. MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 175 to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Laud by way of penance. He went, habited in lowly attire, with a sprig of broom in his hat to denote his humility. The expia- tion finished, he adopted the name of Plantagenet, from Planta and Genista* the old name of the broom, and transmitted this to his princely descendants.f As an emblem of humility, too, it was worn by St. Louis, in 1234, on the occasion of his marriage with Margaret, eldest daughter of Raymond Berengarius, Count of Pro- vence, and a new order of knights was instituted to commemorate the event. The motto of the order was " Exaltat humiles," and the collar of the order was made up of the flowers and seed-pods of the common broom, enamelled and intermixed with fleur-de-lys of gold. This Ordre de la Genesle, or Order of the Broom, continued till the death of Charles the Fifth. " Though the feeblest thing that nature forms, A frail and perishing flower art thou ; Yet thy race has survived a thousand storms That have laid the monarch and warrior low. The storied urn may be crumbled to dust, And Time may the marble bust deface ; But thou wilt be faithful and firm to thy trust, The memorial-flower of a princely race. Then hail to thee, fair Broomstick ! herald of a thousand years, memorial of human trials, triumphs, and sufferings. Abide with us, oh ! tough and well-tried * GENISTA. The Celt implies small bush ; or from genu, a knee, from the bending of the twigs ; or geno, to produce, on account of its abundance. t Sandford's " Genealogical History." 17() BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. friend ; and now, too feeble for thy office of cleanliness, hint to us of the old Roman pageant, when the noblesse of Rome assembled, and the officers swept the hall with a green broom affixed to a sturdy broomstick. That was the honour paid by Roman patricians to intellect, energy, and virtue, which, however humble in their origin, had an equal chance with wealth and ancestral title in sharing the offices and honours of the state. The broom was as conscious of its dignity as the newly-elected councillors just lifted from the ranks of the people ; and the moment its green and flowerless branches touched the floor of the assembly, it broke into golden blossoms, a mute symbol of the fertility of virtue.* Hail to thee ! for all the legends of old Time thou bringest us, from the state processions of Rome down to the hanging of a broom at the door of a Russian maiden pining for a lover. The broomstick was the chosen Pegasus of the midnight hags, when, gliding like bats through the midnight, they laid plots and counterplots to involve poor human nature in the sufferings of superstition : "Do not strange nntrons mount on high, And switch their broomsticks through the sky, Bide post o'er hills, and woods, and seas, From Thule to the Hesperides '.* f Verily they do ; but they are only the embodied sins of men's consciences, which have taken shape and come This story is related by Marcellinus Ammianus. The custom of publicly sweeping the hall on occasion of those assemblies was maintained for a l