136 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



making the tour of the world with English seed-wheat 

 and English clover. We can hardly say, indeed, what 

 the real English flowers of the plains were originally 

 like ; for some of them must now be quite extinct, and 

 others must have grown weedier and coarser to suit the 

 new circumstances brought about by extended cultiva- 

 tion. But here on the peaty hillside hollows, and in the 

 unreclaimed bogs, bits of which may be found almost 

 everywhere, a totally different type of vegetation still 

 abundantly survives. Reedy tussocks of cotton-grass 

 and bog-rush rise in little islands from the level turf; 

 and in between them the shallow water stagnates and 

 reddens in the hollows with the iron-mould of decaying 

 leaves and skeleton club-moss. These lower bits, beside 

 the trickling rills that slowly drain off the overflow from 

 the pools, are the favourite haunts of sundew and butter- 

 wort ; and what gives them their special interest to the 

 rural mind is this that here, side by side in treacherous 

 friendship, grow the two most ruthless and marvellous 

 among our English insect-eating plants. 



Sundew, perhaps, is the best known to the world at 

 large of the two uncanny things, by name at any rate ; 

 if for no other reason, at least on account of Mr. Swin- 

 burne's exquisite and musical lines : the only entire 

 poem, I fancy, which he has ever devoted to any single 

 natural object ; for, in spite of his vague pantheistic 

 nature-worship, man, not nature, is the real centre round 

 which the eddy of his thoughts revolves. Here you 

 have an entire plant, lifted, root and all, from its moist 

 bed as curious a herb to look at as any in the world ; 

 and indeed it is no wonder that so fantastic a creature 

 should have been the one weed to attract in passing our 



