Furze. 
J 45 
is to turn to chilly prose, and recount how the great botanist 
conveyed to Sweden some plants of “ the prickly gorse that 
decks itself with ornaments of gold,” and how he complained 
that he could never preserve it in his garden through the 
winter! 
Even strangers who come from those sunny southern lands, 
“ Where the rough rocks with tender myrtles bloom,” 
have exhausted the powers of their own musical language in 
describing their feelings of admiration whilst looking upon 
some wild common, fragrant with the perfume and resplendent 
with the lustrous beauty of that plant which, sings Keats, 
“ buds lavish gold.” 
Floral caligraphists employ this inimitable blossom as the 
emblem of anger , but to the poetess quoted above it conveyed 
a far higher import: 
“Mountain blossoms, shining blossoms, 
Do ye teach us to be glad 
When no summer can be had, 
Blooming in our inward bosoms ? 
Ye whom God preserveth still, 
Set as lights upon a hill, 
Tokens to the wintry earth that Beauty liveth still! 
“Mountain gorses, do you teach us 
From that academic chair 
Canopied with azure air, 
That the wisest word man reaches 
Is the humblest he can speak ? 
Ye who live on mountain peak. 
Yet live low along the ground, beside the grasses meek! 
Not only, indeed, do these “shining blossoms teach us to 
be glad,” by means of their fragrance, and by reason of the 
glowing sea of golden light which they ofttimes display to our 
gratified vision, but by the numerous valuable uses to which 
they can be put—uses too numerous to be mentioned here. 
“In calm and sunny weather,” says a floral writer, “it is 
pleasant to hear the crackling sound produced by the explo¬ 
sion of the elastic seed-vessels among furze-bushes, resembling 
that of tiny popguns, such as fairies might be supposed to use, 
if those small people ever disturbed their pleasant revels with 
warlike deeds.” 
10 
