THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 
17 
choked up with weeds and herbage. The stately columns 
of Athens are woven with ivy, and violets, and grasses. 
The Roman Porum is a cow-market; the Tarpeian Rock 
a waste; and the Palace of the Csesars a rope-walk! 
Rome herself, where is she ? She is— 
“At once the grave, the city, and the wilderness; 
And where her wrecks, 1 like shattered mountains, rise, 
The flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress 
The hones of Desolation’s nakedness.” 
Shelley 
It is the fate of all: the white stone obliterates the 
turf, but the stone crumbles, and its ashes nourish the 
very grass which it had crushed before. London, Paris, 
Boston, go the same way, and grasses will one day 
cluster round the monuments of their highest glory ! 
It is always in rich grassy places that the little springs 
and water runnels bubble up into the light, and start off 
on their journey of fertility, down in the dark dell of 
the old wood, where the huge roots of the trees are 
matted all over with green and golden mosses, which 
sometimes hang like green beards, and dip into the 
pebbly waters; where the little squirrel finds a home, 
and the lizard and the shrew-mice burrow. There it is 
that, in rich circles of waving grass, the fresh sparkling 
waters bubble up with a gurgling sound, and go tinkling 
along under the shelving banks, kissing the willows, and 
chiming their soft songs as they jump over the clumps of 
timber. 
The little brooks always make their pathway where 
the grasses grow; for the little brooks and the grasses 
love each other, and they creep along together plotting 
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