JULY. 



299 



bringing the lines of the American poet, LONGFELLOW, 



to mind 



" Above the lowly plants it towers, 

 The fennel with its yellow flowers, 

 And in an earlier age than our's 

 Was gifted with the wond'rous powers 



Lost vision to restore ; 

 It gave new strength and fearless mood, 

 And gladiators, fierce and rude, 

 Mingled it in their daily food, 

 And he who battled and subdued, 



A wreath of fennel wore." 



Nature herself presents occasionally lurid places of 

 obsceneness, and such weedy slums of defilement, as 

 almost to realize an abode of the furies, or a spot 

 where Ceberus might have poisoned the ground with 

 his froth such rampant ugly burdocks and foul-smel- 

 ling hound' s-tongues crowd the darksome glen. Such 

 a spot exists at Longwood Warren, near Winchester, 

 and is thus described most graphically by Dr. BHOM- 

 FIELD.* " All the fetid, acrid, venomous, and un- 

 sightly plants that Britain produces seem congregated 

 on this blighted spot, a witch's garden of malevolent 

 and deadly herbs, ready for gathering into her cauldron, 

 which, for aught I know, may be nightly simmering 

 and seething in this lone spot, as fitting a rendezvous 

 for the powers of darkness on Hallowmas-eve, as their 

 favourite Blocksberg, in the Hartz forest, for a Wal- 

 purgisnacht commemoration. Beneath and around 

 the clumps of ragged moss-grown elder and hoary 

 stunted whitethorn, the first in some respects itself a 

 plant of power, meet shelter for the noxious brood it 

 gathers about it, rise thickets of tall nettles and rank 

 hemlock, concealing the deadly but alluring dwale 



* P/iytologist, vol. Hi. p. 597- 



