I'lie Poetry of Flowers. 
21 
The sap shrank to the root through every pore, 
As blood to a heart that will beat no more. 
For winter came : the wind was his whip, 
One choppy finger was on his lip ; 
He had torn the cataracts from the hills, 
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles. 
His breath was a chain, which, without a sound, 
The earth, and the air, and the water bound ; 
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot throne 
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone. 
Then the weeds, which were forms of living death, 
Fled from the frosts to the earth beneath ; 
Their decay and sudden flight from frost 
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost 1 
And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant 
The moles and the dormice died for want ; 
And the birds dropped stiff from the frozen air, 
And were caught in the branches naked and bare. 
First there came down a thawing rain, 
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again ; 
Then there steamed up a freezing dew, 
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew ; 
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about 
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, 
Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff, 
And snapped them off with his rigid griff. 
When winter had gone and spring came back, 
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck ; 
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and 
darnels, 
Rose, like the dead, from their buried charnels. 
