Part 10

"Grand terraqueous spectacle, From centre to circumference, unveil'd."

The wind was moderate and not cold. Toward Ulleswater the mountain drops down abruptly many hundred feet, but its vast western slope appeared one smooth, unbroken surface of grass. The following jottings in my notebook, on the spot, preserve some of the features of the scene: "All the northern landscape lies in the sunlight as far as Carlisle,

"A tumultuous waste of huge hilltops;"

not quite so severe and rugged as the Scotch mountains, but the view more pleasing and more extensive than the one I got from Ben Venue. The black tarns at my feet,--Keppel Cove Tarn one of them, according to my map,--how curious they look! I can just discern the figure of a man moving by the marge of one of them. Away beyond Ulleswater is a vast sweep of country flecked here and there by slowly moving cloud shadows. To the northeast, in places, the backs and sides of the mountains have a green, pastoral voluptuousness, so smooth and full are they with thick turf. At other points the rock has fretted through the verdant carpet. St. Sunday's Crag to the west, across Grisedale, is a steep acclivity covered with small, loose stones, as if they had been dumped over the top, and were slowly sliding down; but nowhere do I see great bowlders strewn about. Patches of black peat are here and there. The little rills, near and far, are white as milk, so swiftly do they run. On the more precipitous sides the grass and moss are lodged, and hold like snow, and are as tender in hue as the first April blades. A multitude of lakes are in view, and Morecambe Bay to the south. There are sheep everywhere, loosely scattered, with their lambs; occasionally I hear them bleat. No other sound is heard but the chirp of the mountain pipit. I see the wheat-ear flitting here and there. One mountain now lies in full sunshine, as fat as a seal, wrinkled and dimpled where it turns to the west, like a fat animal when it bends to lick itself. What a spectacle is now before me!--all the near mountains in shadow, and the distant in strong sunlight; I shall not see the like of that again. On some of the mountains the green vestments are in tatters and rags, so to speak, and barely cling to them. No heather in view. Toward Windermere the high peaks and crests are much more jagged and rocky. The air is filled with the same white, motionless vapor as in Scotland. When the sun breaks through,--

"Slant watery lights, from parting clouds, apace Travel along the precipice's base, Cheering its naked waste of scatter'd stone."

Amid these scenes one comes face to face with nature,

"With the pristine earth, The planet in its nakedness,"

as he cannot in a wooded country. The primal, abysmal energies, grown tender and meditative, as it were, thoughtful of the shepherd and his flocks, and voiceful only in the leaping torrents, look out upon one near at hand and pass a mute recognition. Wordsworth perpetually refers to these hills and dales as lonely or lonesome; but his heart was still more lonely. The outward solitude was congenial to the isolation and profound privacy of his own soul. "Lonesome," he says of one of these mountain dales, but

"Not melancholy,--no, for it is green And bright and fertile, furnished in itself With the few needful things that life requires. In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie, How tenderly protected."

It is this tender and sheltering character of the mountains of the Lake district that is one main source of their charm. So rugged and lofty, and yet so mellow and delicate! No shaggy, weedy growths or tangles anywhere; nothing wilder than the bracken, which at a distance looks as solid as the grass. The turf is as fine and thick as that of a lawn. The dainty-nosed lambs could not crave a tenderer bite than it affords. The wool of the dams could hardly be softer to the foot. The last of July the grass was still short and thick, as if it never shot up a stalk and produced seed, but always remained a fine, close mat. Nothing was more unlike what I was used to at home than this universal tendency (the same is true in Scotland and in Wales) to grass, and, on the lower slopes, to bracken, as if these were the only two plants in nature. Many of these eminences in the north of England, too lofty for hills and too smooth for mountains, are called fells. The railway between Carlisle and Preston winds between them, as Houghill Fells, Tebay Fells, Shap Fells, etc. They are, even in midsummer, of such a vivid and uniform green that it seems as if they must have been painted. Nothing blurs or mars the hue; no stalk of weed or stem of dry grass. The scene, in singleness and purity of tint, rivals the blue of the sky. Nature does not seem to ripen and grow sere as autumn approaches, but wears the tints of May in October.

VIII

A GLANCE AT BRITISH WILD FLOWERS

The first flower I plucked in Britain was the daisy, in one of the parks in Glasgow. The sward had recently been mown, but the daisies dotted it as thickly as stars. It is a flower almost as common as the grass; find a square foot of greensward anywhere, and you are pretty sure to find a daisy, probably several of them. Bairnwort--child's flower--it is called in some parts, and its expression is truly infantile. It is the favorite of all the poets, and when one comes to see it he does not think it has been a bit overpraised. Some flowers please us by their intrinsic beauty of color and form; others by their expression of certain human qualities: the daisy has a modest, lowly, unobtrusive look that is very taking. A little white ring, its margin unevenly touched with crimson, it looks up at one like the eye of a child.

"Thou unassuming Commonplace Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace, Which Love makes for thee!"

Not a little of its charm to an American is the unexpected contrast it presents with the rank, coarse ox-eye daisy so common in this country, and more or less abundant in Britain, too. The Scotch call this latter "dog daisy." I thought it even coarser, and taller there than with us. Though the commonest of weeds, the "wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower" sticks close at home; it seems to have none of the wandering, devil-may-care, vagabond propensities of so many other weeds. I believe it has never yet appeared upon our shores in a wild state, though Wordsworth addressed it thus:--

"Thou wander'st this wild world about Unchecked by pride or scrupulous doubt."

The daisy is prettier in the bud than in the flower, as it then shows more crimson. It shuts up on the approach of foul weather; hence Tennyson says the daisy closes

"Her crimson fringes to the shower."

At Alloway, whither I flitted from Glasgow, I first put my hand into the British nettle, and, I may add, took it out again as quickly as if I had put it into the fire. I little suspected that rank dark-green weed there amid the grass under the old apple-trees, where the blue speedwell and cockscombs grew, to be a nettle. But I soon learned that the one plant you can count on everywhere in England and Scotland is the nettle. It is the royal weed of Britain. It stands guard along every road-bank and hedge-row in the island.

Put your hand to the ground after dark in any fence corner, or under any hedge, or on the border of any field, and the chances are ten to one you will take it back again with surprising alacrity. And such a villainous fang as the plant has! it is like the sting of bees. Your hand burns and smarts for hours afterward. My little boy and I were eagerly gathering wild flowers on the banks of the Doon, when I heard him scream, a few yards from me. I had that moment jerked my stinging hand out of the grass as if I had put it into a hornet's nest, and I knew what the youngster had found. We held our burning fingers in the water, which only aggravated the poison. It is a dark green, rankly growing plant, from one to two feet high, that asks no leave of anybody. It is the police that protects every flower in the hedge. To "pluck the flower of safety from the nettle danger" is a figure of speech that has especial force in this island. The species of our own nettle with which I am best acquainted, the large-leaved Canada nettle, grows in the woods, is shy and delicate, is cropped by cattle, and its sting is mild. But apparently no cow's tongue can stand the British nettle, though, when cured as hay, it is said to make good fodder. Even the pigs cannot eat it till it is boiled. In starvation times it is extensively used as a pot-herb, and, when dried, its fibre is said to be nearly equal to that of flax. Rough handling, I am told, disarms it, but I could not summon up courage to try the experiment. Ophelia made her garlands

"Of crow-flowers, daisies, nettles, and long purples."

But the nettle here referred to was probably the stingless dead-nettle.

A Scotch farmer, with whom I became acquainted, took me on a Sunday afternoon stroll through his fields. I went to his kirk in the forenoon; in the afternoon he and his son went to mine, and liked the sermon as well as I did. These banks and braes of Doon, of a bright day in May, are eloquent enough for anybody. Our path led along the river course for some distance. The globe-flower, like a large buttercup with the petals partly closed, nodded here and there. On a broad, sloping, semi-circular bank, where a level expanse of rich fields dropped down to a springy, rushy bottom near the river's edge, and which the Scotch call a brae, we reclined upon the grass and listened to the birds, all but the lark new to me, and discussed the flowers growing about. In a wet place the "gillyflower" was growing, suggesting our dentaria, or crinkle-root. This is said to be "the lady's smock all silver-white" of Shakespeare, but these were not white, rather a pale lilac. Near by, upon the ground, was the nest of the meadow pipit, a species of titlark, which my friend would have me believe was the wood-lark,--a bird I was on the lookout for. The nest contained six brown-speckled eggs,--a large number, I thought. But I found that this is the country in which to see birds'-nests crowded with eggs, as well as human habitations thronged with children. A white umbelliferous plant, very much like wild carrot, dotted the turf here and there. This, my companion said, was pig-nut, or ground-chestnut, and that there was a sweet, edible tuber at the root of it, and, to make his words good, dug up one with his fingers, recalling Caliban's words in the "Tempest":--

"And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts."

The plant grows freely about England, but does not seem to be troublesome as a weed.

In a wooded slope beyond the brae, I plucked my first woodruff, a little cluster of pure white flowers, much like that of our saxifrage, with a delicate perfume. Its stalk has a whorl of leaves like the galium. As the plant dries its perfume increases, and a handful of it will scent a room.

The wild hyacinths, or bluebells, had begun to fade, but a few could yet be gathered here and there in the woods and in the edges of the fields. This is one of the plants of which nature is very prodigal in Britain. In places it makes the underwoods as blue as the sky, and its rank perfume loads the air. Tennyson speaks of "sheets of hyacinths." We have no wood flower in the Eastern States that grows in such profusion.

Our flowers, like our birds and wild creatures, are more shy and retiring than the British. They keep more to the woods, and are not sowed so broadcast. Herb Robert is exclusively a wood plant with us, but in England it strays quite out into the open fields and by the roadside. Indeed, in England I found no so-called wood flower that could not be met with more or less in the fields and along the hedges. The main reason, perhaps, is that the need of shelter is never so great there, neither winter nor summer, as it is here, and the supply of moisture is more uniform and abundant. In dampness, coolness, and shadiness, the whole climate is woodsy, while the atmosphere of the woods themselves is almost subterranean in its dankness and chilliness. The plants come out for sun and warmth, and every seed they scatter in this moist and fruitful soil takes.