
20 The Poetry of Flowers. 






And the Indian plants, of scent and hue, 
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew, 
Leaf after leaf, day by day, 
Were massed into the common clay. 
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red, 
And white with the whiteness of what is dead, 
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed ; 
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast. 
And the gusty winds waked the wingéd seeds 
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds, 
Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem, 
Which rotted into earth with them. 
The water-blooms under the rivulet 
Fell from the stalks on which they were set ; 
And the eddies drove them here and there, 
As the winds did those of the upper air. 
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks 
Were bent and tangled across the walks; 
And the leafless network of parasite bowers 
Massed into ruin, and all sweet flowers. 
Between the time of the wind and the snow, 
All loathliest weeds began to grow, 
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a 
speck, 
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back, 
The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid, 
Wept, and the tears within each lid 
Of its folded leaves, which together grew, 
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue, 
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon 
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn ; 


