THE JULY GRASS. 39 
worthy to be thought of for a week and remembered for 
a year. Slender grasses, branched round about with 
slenderer boughs, each tipped with pollen and rising in 
tiers cone-shaped—too delicate to grow tall—cluster at 
the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the 
wind would snap them. A great grass, stout and thick, 
rises three feet by the hedge, with a head another foot 
nearly, very green and strong and. bold, lifting itself 
right up to you; you must say, ‘What a fine grass!’ 
Grasses whose, awns succeed each other alternately ; 
grasses whose tops seem flattened ; others drooping over 
the shorter blades beneath ; some that you can only find 
by parting the heavier growth around them ; hundreds 
and hundreds, thousands and thousands. The kingly 
poppies on the dry summit of the mound take no heed 
of these, the populace, their subjects so numerous they 
cannot be numbered, A barren race they are, the proud 
poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but 
raising up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of 
nothing. They are useless, they are bitter, they are 
allied to sleep and poison and everlasting night; yet 
they are forgiven because they are not commonplace. 
Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the 
poppies commonplace. There is genius in them, the 
genius of colour, and they are saved. Even when they 
take the room of the corn we must admire them. The 
mighty multitude of nations, the millions and millions 
of the grass stretching away in intertangled ranks, 
through pasture and mead from shore to shore, have no 
kinship with these their lords. The ruler is always a 
foreigner. From England to China the native born is 
no king; the poppies are the Normans of the field. 
One of these on the mound is very beautiful, a width of 
petal, a clear silkiness of colour three shades higher than 
