OUR PASTORAL LIFE. 245 



there is as little poetry in a nettle as in any herb I know, but on 

 this day, it did all that the best poetry can do. Like a mighty exor- 

 cist, it summoned up the vision of his country, — the haunts and play- 

 ground of his childhood, — the cottage of his mother ; and it heart- 

 ened him for his duty, and nerved his arm ; for indeed he would 

 return to her, and it, with the honest pride that nor she, nor his 

 birthplace, should be ashamed of their soldier. One thus endued 



" Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans 

 To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 

 Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 

 Are at his heart ; and such fideUty 

 It is his darling passion to approve ; 

 More brave for this, that he hath much to love." 



And it was even so : — he returned with affections undecayed, and 

 from the rudest to the gentlest heart in the hamlet all love him. 



His pleasure is, however, not to tell of what he has done and seen ; 

 — it is rather to look backwards on the days when youth was in its 

 prime. He loves to revisit the primrose bank, which he re-peoples 

 with his youthful associates ; and when he casts up their virtues and 

 their fates, he weeps again, — for " the flowers o' the forest are a' wed 

 awae." — You feel that no other metaphor but a botanical one could 

 convey his feelings, for where otherwise was he to find words, which, 

 while they gave utterance and relief to his sadness, mingled no alloy 

 in the revivals wherein he would see only unfaultiness and early 

 decay? And when he recalled his buttercup experiments, — his 

 rambles in the fairy dean, — his intimacy with every floweret of it, 

 and with every tree, he would, satiated with the pleasant remem- 

 brances, coiitrast them with his quieter pleasures in the same haunts 

 now, and remind an old companion of when 



" We twae hae run about the braes, 

 And pou'd the Gowans fine ; 

 But we 've wandered mony a weary foot. 

 Syne auld lang syne." 



Thus had the cheerful-hearted man spent some two or three years. 

 He had finished the only work his heart was set upon : — he had 

 enclosed his sister's grave, and attempted, yet in vain, to adorn it 



new enemy, one he had not seen since he had left England in his youth, — 

 in short our common stingy Nettle, and which, by forcibly reminding him 

 of his native land, gave him also infinite delight." Miss E. Bell. — In further 

 illustration Mr. Hepburn has furnished me with the following extract : — 

 "A Sydney (IV. S. Wales) Flower Show. — Some of the producers evince 

 their fealty to their native land by exhibiting specimens of her weeds, or 

 more properly field flowers, strangers to the colony, and difficult to rear in 

 the climate ; I found myself adoring a Buttercup, idolizing a Daisy, and 

 ardently coveting possession of a glorious Dandelion, which, classically 

 labelled Leontodon Taraxacum, occupied one of the high places in the ex- 

 hibition, and was treated as an illustrious foreigner." — Our Antipodes, or 

 Rambles in the Austrahan Colonies, by Lieut.-Col. Mundy (1852), vol. i. 

 p. 72. 



