THE GREEN WORLD 241 



gold or poppy flame ; distance subdues it ; but on the 

 spot it surpasses either of those, I think, in beauty. 

 The colour varies from intense azure, or speedwell blue, 

 to that sky tint in which Mars is lamped on a cloud- 

 less evening, the darker shades being more general ; but 

 blue is not the only colour, though the commanding 

 one of viper's bugloss. Many of the blossoms, like 

 the lungwort's, have a touch of red, or rosy, about 

 them, which runs into purple. I found the whole 

 field humming. The hive bees and humble bees 

 were eager on every bugloss stem, and there were 

 some plants that put out six splendid spikes of blue, 

 spikes often growing four feet high. Imagine forty 

 acres of ground in a high spot covered with a great, 

 even crop of bee larkspur, and you have a picture not 

 more richly painted than this bugloss ground. 



But the setting of the field of azure makes it so 

 incomparable among the flower-colour spectacles an 

 English summer gives. The bugloss is blossoming 

 on these hills of God quite six hundred feet above the 

 sea, and from its ground we look on our noble Hamp- 

 shire panorama of tree-capped hill, bare down, and 

 oak and hazel woods, whose darkening green is such a 

 sombre, restful feature of July. The azures of the 

 sheeted bugloss, and next them, on the side and crest 

 of another wave of chalk down, and in the trough 

 between the two waves, a full twenty acres of poppy 

 making a perfectly smooth, even sheet of scarlet 

 and, beyond this, green fading into misty purple. 



Q 



