Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/714



N all the variety and fulness of sensations that come to us from summer days, there is none more simply sweet and delightful to remember than our discovery of the first bit of green grass growing in some sheltered spot of the pavement, or on the sunny exposure of an humble roof.

We feel then that winter is going; that life, strong and insinuating, has touched again the icy bosom of Nature, and has thrilled her with an irresistible power of generation; and we know that spring is close by, even if the streets are filled with slush, and we see snow, nothing but snow, over the distant hills at the horizon.

The reäppearance of the grass, either on the edge of the fields, along country roads, or in the small garden-plots of city houses, is the glad tiding of that spring resurrection which brings joy to our step and to our heart. What close observers of the least vegetation it makes of us during those warm early days! Nothing escapes our vigilant and hungry eyes, longing to feed anew upon luxuriance.

Grass is the fragrant cradle where the new-born bloom of earth awakens, and is gently rocked by the winds; it is the soft, velvety carpet that Nature spreads before the coming train of her summer glories; and a thing too full of beauty for us not to give it some of the admiration which the brilliancy of flowers universally wins and retains. Now that June days invite us to walk idly in fields where the mower has not yet swung his scythe, we will look at the grasses the wind so lightly plays with, and we will tell you something about them.

If you are a botanist, impatient of new knowledge, and satisfied only with the conclusive classifications of species, or, perhaps, with the modest discovery of some rare specimen of vegetation which enhances to your eyes the beauty of a particular locality; if you ask of Nature to be your instructress, and go to her as to a school-teacher, rich with the accumulated facts of ages of creative vigor and of magnificent display, you will enjoy, in your way, that grassy bank under the oak trees, where I go so often to forget that there are such things as schools, text-books, and pedagogues, and where alone, with the birds that bend the bushes low under the joyous flutter of their wings, or sail careless through the air above my head, and in good company with the million insects that hide their gay life in a twilight of bloom close to the earth, I let myself be kissed by the chaste lips of the divine muse who still inhabits the fields for the poet, and whose impalpable presence we adore as poetry.

Linnæus, the sensitive, single-minded thinker, indulges in a philosophical estimate of the relative usurpation of the soil by different plants, with the eloquence of a large soul at all times moved by whatever affects the destinies of the human race: while he contemplates the grasses, he remembers with what insolent