And the rough steps of vain, unlistening haste, FELICIA HEMANS. 8.- THE RHODORA : ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER? IN May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, Made the black water with their beauty gay; This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky, Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. 9. TO THE SMALL CELANDINE. PANSIES, lilies, kingcups, daisies, EMERSON. Long as there are violets, They will have a place in story: There's a flower that shall be mine,- Ere a leaf is on a bush, In the time before the thrush Ill befall the yellow flowers, They have done as worldlings do,- WORDSWORTH. YE field flowers! the gardens eclipse you, 't is true, For ye waft me to summers of old, When the earth teemed around me with fairy delight, And when daisies and buttercups gladdened my sight, Like treasures of silver and gold. I love you for lulling me back into dreams Of the blue Highland mountains and echoing streams, And of broken blades breathing their balm, While the deer was seen glancing in sunshine remote, And the deep mellow crush of the wood-pigeon's note Made music that sweetened the calm. Not a pastoral song has a pleasanter tune Than ye speak to my heart, little wildlings of June: Of old ruinous castles ye tell, Where I thought it delightful your beauties to find, When the magic of nature first breathed on my mind, And your blossoms were part of her spell. Even now what affections the violet awakes; What landscapes I read in the primrose's looks, Earth's cultureless buds, to my heart ye were dear, Had scathed my existence's bloom; Once I welcome you more, in life's passionless stage, 1 vetch'es, leguminous plants. CAMPBELL. 1. IN an obscure little Swedish village, at the beginning of the last century, was born a boy who was destined to teach men more of the nature of plants than had been gathered by all the observers since the time when Solomon with curious eye noted the ways of the "hyssop on the wall." This was Karl Linné, the son of a poor Swedish clergyman. As Linné he was known by his boyhood comrades, but when he came to address the learned world through books he followed the custom of the old scholars and wrote his name, as he wrote his works, Latin-wise: so that it is as Linnæus that we speak of the illustrious Swede. 2. Linnæus seems to have been born a botanist, and according to his own declaration he was at once transferred from his cradle to a garden. His father had some knowledge of plants, and his uncle, who was his first teacher, had still more. In his diary he records that when he was four years old he went to a garden-party, with his father, and heard the guests discussing the names and properties of plants. He listened carefully to all he heard, and "from that time never ceased harassing his father about the name, quality, and nature of every plant he met with," so that his parent was sometimes quite put out of humor by his constant questioning. 3. The lad was taught in a small grammar-school, where he showed so little taste for books that his father would have apprenticed him to a shoemaker if a physician named Rothmann, who saw the boy's love of natural history, had not taken him into his own house and taught him botany and physiology. At one-and-twenty we find him, with an allowance of eight pounds a year from his father, a struggling student at the University of Upsala, putting folded paper into the soles of his old shoes to keep out the damp and cold, and trusting to chance for a meal. Nevertheless, he diligently persevered in attendance upon the |