A BUNCH OF HERBS 



Europe. Our culture of the soil is not so close and 

 thorough, our occupancy not so entire and exclu- 

 sive. The weeds take up with the farmers' leavings, 

 and find good fare. One may see a large slice taken 

 from a field by elecampane, or by teasel or milk- 

 weed ; whole acres given up to whiteweed, golden- 

 rod, wild carrots, or the ox-eye daisy ; meadows 

 overrun with bear-weed, and sheep pastures nearly 

 ruined by St. John's- wort or the Canada thistle. 

 Our farms are so large and our husbandry so loose 

 that we do not mind these things. By and by we 

 shall clean them out. When Sir Joseph Hooker 

 landed in New England a few years, ago, he was 

 surprised to find how the European plants flour- 

 ished there. He found the wild chicory growing 

 far more luxuriantly than he had ever seen it else- 

 where, "forming a tangled mass of stems and 

 branches, studded with turquoise-blue blossoms, 

 and covering acres of ground." This is one of the 

 many weeds that Emerson binds into a bouquet in 

 his " Humble-Bee: " 



"Succory to match the sky, 

 Columbine with horn of honey, 

 Scented fern and agrimony, 

 Clover, catchfly, adder 's-tongue, 

 And brier-roses, dwelt among." 



A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably 

 have let his reader infer that the bumblebee gathered 

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