292 THE FLOEAL WOELD AND GAEDEN GUIDE. 



gnarled oaks, and clumps of hollies, and cloud-aspiring elm and ash, 

 and a thousand song birds carolling happily, the new villa with its 

 impudent frontage, the newly-railed-in garden, robbed without 

 apology from the poor ; the wretched line of dirty little shops, 

 where one might well believe poison to be cheap and bad change 

 plentiful in every till. Nine-tenths of all those enclosures are no 

 more wan-anted by the spirit of English law than the murder of an 

 unoifending man upon the highway : the statute of Merton has 

 furnished the Shibboleth under which, as by an act of perjury, the 

 people have been robbed of a precious property, and all the means 

 of innocent and healthy recreation, so needed by the toiling 

 thousands of the great metropolis. It is some comfort in the face 

 of wrong to know that there is an element of retribution in the 

 Divine economy. 



If I could forget all this, I would say something about the 

 beauty of the bracken as I knew it in days of yore. It is beautiful 

 now, but it does not charm me as it did when I looked upon it as a 

 mystic thing, as the weird whisperer of the forest solitude, the 

 possessor of magical powers, and the peculiar friend of fays and 

 fairies. Yet though use has tarnished the freshness of feeling in the 

 presence of so lovely an object, I must confess that I am moved when 

 as in these autumnal days I can stand above a great wild hollow 

 and see a hundred acres of bracken tinging the slopes with dull 

 green, bright orange, softened amber, and rich umber hues. I saw 

 this in the middle of July, 1863, when a sharp night-frost swept 

 over the green hills of Siirrey, and tinged all the brakes in the 

 woods and hedgerows prematurely with the tints of autumn. In 

 flying tlu'ough the country by railway there are few glimpses of 

 scenery more refreshing than when we come upon a great open 

 waste, all hills and hollows, smothered all over with stunted brake 

 growing in clumps in just the same way as the brambles grow, 

 though sometimes they carpet the ground uniformly, and their rich, 

 deep green colour, and their diversity of outlines and shadow, suggest 

 ideas of freedom, of frolicsome abandon, of health and appetite, 

 of the odour of wood fires, and the sweet fatigue that lulls us after 

 a long day's roaming in the woods. I should be afraid to inquire 

 for even a moment into the impressions the bracken has made on 

 the minds of poets, for it would lead me into the great garden of 

 English literature, to be lost at last in the far reaching of the subject. 

 But I remember Shakespeare took heed of its dense, sombre leafiness 

 and hid Demetrius in its shadow, when playing the coward to sweet 

 Helena. The rascal Puck thought of brakes, briers, and bogs as 

 the hardest things to penetrate. Our most picturesque of poets, 

 Scott, gives reality to many a scene by the introduction of the 

 brake, glorious sign as it is of unmolested Nature, and the wild 

 growth of things that disdain the help of man. "Wlien Eiioderic 

 Dhu calls up the clan, it is from " shingles grey " and from 

 " bracken bush," and when the vision vanishes the sunbeam glances 

 for a moment on plumes and plaids — 



"The next, all unreflected, shone 

 On bracken green and cold grey stone." 



