A SUMMER AFTERNOON 127 
floored with last year’s faded foliage, giving a 
singular bareness and whiteness to the fore- 
ground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I 
stepped through the edge of all this, into a 
dark little amphitheatre beneath a hemlock 
grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck 
broadly through the trees upon a tiny stream 
and a miniature swamp, — this last being in- 
tensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the 
pale gray of last year’s reeds, and absolutely 
flaming with the gayest yellow light from great 
clumps of cowslips. The illumination seemed 
perfectly weird and dazzling; the spirit of the 
place appeared live, wild, fantastic, almost hu- 
man. Now open your Tennyson, — 
“And the wild marsh marigold shines like fire in swamps 
and hollows gray.” 
Our cowslip, as I have already said, is the 
English marsh marigold. 
History is a grander poetry, and it is often 
urged that the features of Nature in America 
must seem tame because they have no legend- 
ary wreaths to decorate them. It is perhaps 
hard for those of us who are untravelled to ap- 
preciate how densely even the rural parts of 
Europe are overgrown with this ivy of associa- 
tions. Thus, it is fascinating to hear that the 
great French forests of Fontainebleau and St. 
Germain are full of historic trees, — the oak of 
