136 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



making the tour of the world with Engh'sh sccd-whcat 

 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 — a% 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 



