10 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



beauty. Then shall the songs of the golden age be warbled in thine 

 ear ; then shall the spirit of love sweep thy heart-strings, to awaken 

 the melodies of the Empyrean within thee ; and an heritage of eternal 

 beauty shall be thine, in the place of the fieshless fancies which now 

 allure thee. Stay not here, creating dusty heavens, from which, like 

 a wild beast, thou shalt be thrust hereafter, but go out free and glad 

 and commune with the grass, and listen to its stories of the ages. 

 Look back at the dim past, and learn the lesson of its faded peoples 

 and crumbled empires ; learn the ephemeral fleetness of human 

 things, and the grand supremacy of Nature. The temples of the 

 Sun, where eastern multitudes knelt in worship, have sunk down into 

 white and ghastly ruins, and the grasses wave over their broken sculp- 

 tures. The mighty caves of India, where darkness and mystery 

 aided in the fearful work of bloody superstitions, are now choked up 

 with weeds and herbage. The stately columns of Athens are woven 

 with ivy, and violets, and grasses. The Roman Forum is a cow- 

 market; the Tarpeian Rock a waste ; and the Palace of the Caesars a 

 rope-walk ! Rome herself, where is she ? She is — 



At once the grave, the city, and the wilderness; 

 And where her wrecks, like shattered mountains, rise, 

 The flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress 

 The bones of Desolation's nakedness, 



Shellet. 



It is the fate of all : the white stone obliterates the turf, but the 

 stone crumbles, and its ashes nourish the very grass which it had 

 crushed before. London, Paris, Boston, go the same way, and 

 grasses will one day cluster round the monuments of their highest 

 glory ! 



It is always in rich grassy places that the little springs and water- 

 runnels bubble up into the light, and start off on their journey of 

 fertility; down in the dark dell of the old wood, where the huge roots 

 of the trees are matted all over with green and golden mosses, which 

 sometimes hang like green beards, and dip into the pebbly waters ; 

 where the little squirrel finds a home, and the lizard and the shrew- 

 mice burrow. There it is that, in rich circles of waving grass, the 

 fresh sparkling waters bubble up with a gurgling sound, and go 

 tinkling along under the shelving banks, kissing the willows, and 

 chiming their soft songs as they jump over the clumps of timber* 



