MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 
173 
“ Yellow and bright as bullion unalloyed, 
Her blossoms ”— 
used by the good housewives of old to brush the crumbs 
from the dressing-board, and the soiled sand from the 
kitchen floor, is no less dear for its touches of memory, 
and pictures of green imagery, than the lady-birch. It 
grows on the moorland, where there is no shelter from 
the blast of winter or the fierce heat of summer; where 
drought, and sw'amp, and keenest frost have each unmiti¬ 
gated vigour, and where the earth lies flat beneath the 
blue sky, as if it had fallen prostrate, and had no friend 
but the broom to cover it with garments. It is on the 
dreary waste where the red deer loves to wander, and the 
ptarmigan finds a home, that the bonny broom sprinkles 
its round tufts of green, fresh as infancy amid the 
fiercest frost—golden as day-break through the laughing 
summer. There it creeps up and down the hills, and 
amid the wild forest dells, far away from the haunts 
of men, in company of creeping things, of gaps of sun¬ 
shine. and of passing shadows. 
“ There lacked no floure to my dome, 
Ne not so much as floure of brome.” 
Chaucer. 
In yonder greenwood blows the broom ; 
Shepherds, we’ll trust our flocks to stray.— 
Court Nature in her sweetest bloom, 
And steal from Care one summer day.”* 
It was the rushy branches of the broom which sup- 
Langhoine, “The Wilding and the Broom.” 
