THE HEATH. 



THERE are no heaths in New England, or on the Ameri- 

 can Continent. We know them only as they are described 

 in books, or as they are displayed in greenhouses. We 

 are strangers to those immense assemblages that furnish 

 an uninterrupted vegetable covering to the earth's surface, 

 from the plains of Germany to Lapland on the north, and 

 to the Ural Mountains on the east. These plains, called 

 heaths or heathlands, are a kind of sandy bogs, which are 

 favorable to the growth of the Heath, while other plants 

 with these disadvantages of soil cannot compete with them. 

 The tenacity with which they maintain their ground ren- 

 ders them a great obstacle to agricultural improvement. 

 They overspread large districts to the almost entire exclu- 

 sion of other vegetation, rendering the lands unfit to be 

 pastured, and useless for any purpose except to furnish 

 bees with an ample repast but an inferior honey. 



It is often lamented by the lovers of nature that the 

 Heath, the poetical favorite of the people, the humble 

 flower of solitude, the friend of the bird and the bee, af- 

 fording them a bower of foliage and a garden of sweets, 

 and furnishing a bulwark to larks and nightingales against 

 the progress of agriculture, it is often lamented that this 

 plant should be unknown as an indigenous inhabitant of 

 the New World. But if its absence be a cause for regret 

 to those who have learned to admire it as the poetic sym- 

 bol of melancholy, and as a beautiful ornament of the 

 wilds, the husbandman may rejoice in its absence. We 

 have in America the whortleberry, whose numerous spe- 



