THE BELL-FLOWERS 
193 
The pretty iow-branched shrub, the common ling, is 
bright with its reddish flowers ; and so plentiful are they 
that the Icelander would say they threatened a severe win- 
ter. The purple or rose-coloured blossoms of our native 
heaths are growing, too, in large and thickly-clustered 
patches. The name of the former plant — ling (Calluna) 
— is derived from the Greek word “to cleanse’' or 
“'adorn;” whether because it causes the wilderness to 
blossom, or that because, as Sir J. E. Smith observes, 
it merits that title from the domestic uses to which it is 
applied where its twigs are manufactured into brooms. 
Professor Hooker says of it that it makes an excellent 
edging to garden-plots, and will bear clipping as well as 
box. 
But we do not, in the southern parts of Great Britain, 
witness the beauties which tracts of heath-land present in 
the northern portion of our island, nor the services they 
render to those who inhabit the neighbourhood. The 
Highlanders make their beds of the green or dried 
heather; and the hardy and simple mode of life of these 
mountaineers, and their constant exposure to the free and 
invigorating air of their native hills, render their couch a 
more certain place of repose than is the curtained down of 
the luxurious. 
How little do they who, rising at noon-time, spend the 
day in listless indolence, or in the frivolous pursuits of 
fashion, know how many of the charms of existence are 
lost to them ! To them the wide-stretching landscape, the 
lone walk along the meadow or river-side, offer no delight. 
They are unenlivened by all those “skyey influences” 
which can raise the spirits to an overflow of exhilaration, 
and give a corresponding spring to the untiring footstep. 
The odour of the wild, if it greet their languid senses, 
needs the stimulus of greater fragrance, and equals not, 
in their esteem, the perfume which is borne to them from 
the vase of the distiller. Weary they are, yet they do not 
experience the fatigue induced by exertion, which makes 
the hardest bed agreeable and refreshing, and invites to 
a light slumber, unscared by the visitations of restlessness 
or terror. They lose in early life that freshness and vigour 
of feeling which a constant intercourse with nature serves 
to continue ; they cannot taste the chief delights of poetry ; 
