22 NATURE IN ENGLAND. 



country. Weeds of all kinds rare except the nettle. 

 The place to see the Scotch thistle is not in Scotland 

 or England, but in America." 



III. 



ENGLAND is like the margki of a spring-run, near 

 its source always green, always cool, always moist, 

 comparatively free from frost in winter and from 

 drought in summer. The spring-run to which it owes 

 this character is the Gulf Stream, which brings out of 

 the pit of the southern ocean what the fountain brings 

 out of the bowels of the earth a uniform tempera- 

 ture, low but constant ; a fog in winter, a cloud in 

 summer. The spirit of gentle, fertilizing summer 

 rain perhaps never took such tangible and topograph- 

 ical shape before. Cloud-evolved, cloud-enveloped, 

 cloud-protected, it fills the eye of the American trav- 

 eler with a vision of greenness such as he has never 

 before dreamed of; a greenness born of perpetual 

 May, tender, untarnished, ever renewed, and as uni- 

 form and all-pervading as the rain-drops that fall, cov- 

 ering mountain, cliff, and vale alike. The softened, 

 rounded, flowing outlines given to our landscape by 

 a deep fall of snow are given to the English by this 

 depth of vegetable mould and this all-prevailing ver- 

 dure which it supports. Indeed, it is caught upon the 

 shelves and projections of the rocks as if it fell from 

 the clouds, a kind of green snow, and it clings to 



