io6 
NATURE NOTES. 
“ ‘Cette, with its glistening houses white, 
Curves with the curving beach away 
To where the lighthouse beacons bright 
Far in the bay.’ 
“ In Heine s Grave, page 199, we have the lines on Mont- 
martre and the ‘ crisp everlasting-flowers ’ — the only flowers 
which Renan, in his magnificent denunciation of pessimism, de- 
livered at the Lycee Louis le Grand, declares to be not beautiful — 
sharply contrasted with the tall dark firs of the Upper, as with 
the oaks and beeches of the Lower Hartz : — 
“ ‘ . . . . and copse 
Of hazels green in whose depth 
Ilse, the fairy transform’d, 
In a thousand water-breaks light 
Pours her petulant youth — 
Climbing the rock which juts 
O’er the valley, the dizzily perch’d 
Rock — to its iron cross 
Once more thou cling’st ; to the Cross 
Clingest ! with smiles, with a sigh ! ’ 
“ The connection between Montmartre and the German moun- 
tain range, is of course the Reisebilder of the great poet, who is 
laid in the Paris cemetery. 
“No one who has read it is likely to forget the lovely opening 
of the stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse : — 
“ ‘ Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused 
With rain, where thick the crocus blows. 
Past the dark forges long disused, 
The mule-track from St. Laurent goes. 
The bridge is cross’d, and slow we ride, 
Through forest, up the mountain-side.’ 
Or 
“ ‘ The strong children of the Alpine wild ’ 
in the same poem. 
“ The crocus is, I need hardly say, the colchicum so familiar 
to the Swiss tourist, and the same which is mentioned in Obermann, 
at page 227. 
“ In “ Obermann once more ” we have the yellow gentian at page 
232, and the crocus again at page 244. 
“The oleander also appears in Thyrsis : — 
“ ‘ Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale 
(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep 
The morningless and unawakening sleep 
Under the flowery oleanders pale) ’ — 
as it does, with more cheerful association, among the Lyric 
poems in The Terrace at Berne : — 
“ ‘ Ah, shall I see thee, while a flush 
Of startled pleasure floods thy brow, 
Quick through the oleanders brush, 
And clap thy hands, and cry : ’Tis thou ! ’ 
