38 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
What a happy blending of natural and poetic truth have we 
in these lines of Coleridge! 
“Many a glowworm in the shade 
Lights up her love torch ;” 
for, like Hero, who lit her nightly torch to guide her fond Le- 
ander, even so the glowworm gives this bright token to her 
ardent flame hovering above the grass, the glowworm being in 
truth but the wingless mate of the fire-fly. 
But in all our midnight stroll I have said comparatively little 
of the dew, yet in the whimseys of the dew alone there is a sufh- 
cient invitation to “let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary 
walk.” The path of the night rambler is paved and illuminated 
\with brilliants, and to the tyro in these fields seems especially 
decked out for the occasion. A sheen of iridescent silver flashes 
through the grass on right and left at every swing of the lantern, 
like a flitting phantom of a rainbow. The mazes of the spider 
festoon the grass in a drapery of diaphanous silver lace pendent 
in sparkling spans from clover head to grass tip, and enveloping 
the entire meadow beneath its glistening meshes. An answer- 
ing pearly spangle greets your passage hither and yon from the 
wheel-shaped gossamers everywhere hung among the herbage, for 
nature crowns this airy marvel with a rare diadem.* These in- 
numerable “wheels of lace,’ such as remain intact, are mostly 
invisible by day, except to a quiet searching eye, and the greater 
portion of their number are renewed or freshly brought into be- 
ing during the twilight, and are quickly baptized with dew, every 
thread and strand strung with brilliants, suggesting a possible 
clew to the old-time popular belief that gossamers were “com- 
posed of dew burned by the sun.” 
In the caprice of the various leaves in their attitude towards 
moisture there is much of interest; the fastidiousness of this leaf, 
the eager affinity of that, one appearing as dry as at midnoon, 
and another laved and revelling in the nocturnal bath. Here is 
the common plantain at our feet as wet as though fresh from 
