DECEMBER. 547 



he has gathered some of his brightest and most che- 

 rished favourites ! There, whiter than snow, waves 

 the silken Cotton-grass ; the red-leaved Sundew shines 

 revealed upon the ermine moss on which it floats; the 

 delicate Rose-pimpernel almost immersed, just shows 

 its roseate flowers; and the Bog- violet (Viola palus- 

 tris), or the fringed petals of the lovely Menyanthes, 

 charm the gazing eye amidst a host of delicate Carices. 

 But the bog-moss itself is beautiful, in its several 

 varieties of a lurid green as it floats in the water, 

 pure white on the edges and surface of the morass 

 above which the screaming plover wheels, and of a 

 beautiful rose-colour when the moisture has altogether 

 left it. Ah ! how often have my wandering feet trod 

 delighted on the soft snowy bog-moss on the blue- 

 topt "Wrekin where I first gathered among it the blue 

 greasy-leaved Pinguicula on the western descent of 

 oft-visited Malvern mixed with the lowly Cranberry 

 on the borders of Bomere's fair watery expanse in 

 Salop, with the fairy ivy-leaved Bell-flower on the 

 margin of Llyn Teivy and its sister lakes where 

 Growrog's lonely pool and gray stones, near St. David's, 

 receives amidst its barren wildness a few stray shreds 

 of beauty from the golden corolls of the Hypericum 

 elodes, and the silver flowers of the floating Alisma 

 natans, amidst its dreary marshy waste on the black 

 morasses of Cardigan, wedded to the beauteous pink- 

 flowered Andromeda on the shores of Pembroke, 

 lulled by the murmur of the sea amidst the fragrance 

 of bushes of Bog Myrtle or 



" Amid the heart of many thousand mists," 



where the young Severn frets timorously in silver 

 lines shrouded in the scowling passes of drear Plin- 



