80 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



ness, ropes, and basket-work; and with which they symbolize, under the 

 name of Betu or mn beatha, the clan of the Buchanans. It is the 

 same birch as that from which our poor imbecile stump was cut, 

 which forms the great forests of the North ; which climbs up rugged 

 mountain-sides, to peep over the precipices, and fling the light of 

 vegetable grace and beauty over the giant solitudes of snow. It is 

 the same birch which fills us with forest lore when we see its silvery 

 stem towering up, straight as an arrow, to the sky, and waving its 

 plumes of pensile beauty in the sunlight ; which listens to the liquid 

 whistle of the early thrush, and the full melody of sunny May ; and 

 whitih shelters the robin and the blackbird with its boughs — 



A thing of beauty is a joy for ever — 



a broomstick, then, shall be a joy to us. 

 The bonny broom, * 



Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed, 

 Her blossoms; 



used by the good housewifes of old to brush the crumbs from the 

 dressing-board, and the soiled sand from the kitchen floor, is no less 

 dear for its touches of memory, and pictures of green imagery, than 

 the lady-birch. It grows on the moorland, where there is no shelter 

 from the blast of winter or the fierce heat of summer ; where drought, 

 and swamp, and keenest frost have each unmitigated vigour, and 

 where the earth lies flat beneath the blue sky, as if it had fallen 

 prostrate, and had no friend but the broom to cover it with garments. 

 It is on the dreary waste where the red deer loves to wander, and the 

 ptarmigan finds a home, that the bonny broom sprinkles its round 

 tufts of green, fresh as infancy amid the fiercest frost, — golden as 

 day-break through the laughing summer. There it creeps up and 

 down the hills, and amid the wild forest dells, far away from the 

 haunts of men, in company of creeping things, of gaps of sunshine 

 and of passing shadows. 



There lacked no flour e to my dome, 

 Ne not so much as floure of brome. 



CHAUCER. 



* Broom — A. S.ftrowj; Ger. iese«; D. berem, from D. bremmen, because 

 the seeds when ripe, burst from the pods with considerable noise, Ital. scope 

 garnate; Sp. escobas ; Rus. metlii. 



