MATTHEW ARNOLD'S PLANT ALLUSIONS. 105 
“ 1 Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ? 
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, 
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 
Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, 
And stocks in fragrant blow ; 
Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, 
And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, 
And the full moon, and the white evening-star. 
“ ‘ O easy access to the hearer’s grace 
When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine ! 
For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, 
She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine, 
She knew each lily white which Enna yields, 
Each rose with blushing face ; 
She loved the Dorian pipe the Dorian strain. 
But ah, of our poor Thames she never heard ! 
Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirr’d ; 
And we should tease her with our plaint in vain ! 
“ ‘Well ! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be, 
Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour 
In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp’d hill ! 
Who, if not I, for questing here hath power ? 
I know the wood which hides the daffodil, 
I know the Fyfield tree, 
I know what white, what purple fritillaries 
The grassy harvest of the river-fields, 
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields, 
And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries.’ 
“In subsequent verses we have amongst other things, the 
Hawthorn, the Cowslip, the Orchis, the Loose strife, the Mea- 
dowsweet, and the Wood Anemone, all set in their characteristic 
surroundings. 
“ The next verses are from the poem on Carnac in North- 
Western France : — 
‘ ‘ ‘ Behind me on their grassy sweep, 
Bearded with lichen, scrawl’d and grey, 
The giant stones of Carnac sleep, 
In the mild evening of the May. 
“ ‘ No priestly stern procession now 
Moves through their rows of pillars old ; 
No victims bleed, no Druids bow — 
Sheep make the daisied aisles their fold. 
“‘From bush to bush the cuckoo flies, 
The orchis red gleams everywhere ; 
Gold furze with broom in blossom vies, 
The blue-bells perfume all the air.’ 
“ With these we may contrast the following scene from the 
South-East of the same country : — 
“ ‘ Dotting the fields of corn and vine, 
Like ghosts the huge, gnarl’d olives stand. 
Behind, that lovely mountain-line 1 
While, by the strand, 
