X. 



RUSHES. 



. - 



_-.> HO that has read them can ever 

 forget Mr. Ruskin's wonderful 

 passages on the grasses. This 

 commonest of all plants, trode 

 upon with indifference, made commonplace by its wide 

 distribution and persistency, is shown by him to be 

 little short of a miracle. -Never was eloquence more 

 convincing, nor rhetoric more effectively directed. He 

 glanced at the more ornamental grasses rising in mimic 

 towers to beautify the most neglected corners, often 

 hanging out their seed-like pearls at the end of silken 

 threads to add a delicacy and grace to what else were 

 wildernesses. But his highest praise was reserved for 

 the common grass of the field, to which we owe, among 

 other things, that satisfaction to the eye in looking on 

 a wide landscape. The more it is crushed down, walked 

 over, rolled, nibbled of cattle and sheep, the more 

 robust it becomes at the root, and the more succulent 

 it grows in the young shoots it is ever sending up 

 the more the true servant of man, the more it is laid 

 under contribution for the needs of man and beast. 



Another series of very common and beautiful objects 

 much overlooked and maligned are the rushes. " Green 

 grow the rushes, O," but nowadays few care to attend 

 to the modest rushes that in marshy places, by the 



sides of streams, and in ditches and corners of boggy 



190 



