THE STORY OF A BLADE OF GRASS. 
15 
panicles breast-high, and mocks the sea in its rolling 
waves of sparkimg greenness. It is beautiful when it 
mixes with orpine and turritis on the ruined bastion or 
grey garden-wall—beautiful when it sprinkles the brown 
thatch with tufts that find sufficient nourishment, where 
green mosses have been before; beautiful when it clothes 
the harsh upland, and gives nourishment to a thousand 
snow-white fleeces; still more beautiful when it makes 
a little islet in a bright blue mountain lake, <e a fortunate 
purple isle,” with its ruddy spikes of short-lived flowers; 
and precious as well as beautiful when it comes close 
beside us, in company with the sparrow and the robin, as a 
threshold visitant, to soften the footfall of care, and give 
a daily welcome to the world of greenness. 
“ If a friend my grass-grown threshold find, 
0, how my lonely cot resounds with glee! ” 
Is it only for its velvet softness, and the round pillowy 
knolls it heaves up in the vistas of the greenwood, 
that the weary and the dreamer find it so sweet a place 
of rest ? or is it because the wild bee flits around its 
silvery panicles, and blows his bugle as he goes with a 
bounding heart to gather sweets; that the hare and the 
rabbit burrow beneath its smooth sward; that the dear 
lark cowers amid its sprays, and cherishes the children of 
his bosom under its brown matted roots; that the daisy, 
the cowslip, the daffodil, the orchises—the fairies of the 
flower world—the bird's-foot trefoil—the golden fingered 
beauty of the meadows, the little yellow and the large 
strawberry trefoil, are all sheltered and cherished by it: 
and that when the brown-visaged mower—rustic image 
