Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/718

694 is the common sea-reed or matweed (ammophila arundinacea) whose roots penetrate quite deep into the sand. It is extensively planted in Holland for the preservation of the coast. Sometimes, after the course of years, sand-banks, originally loose and shaken by the winds of every storm, are made firm by the matted roots of sea-side grasses, and then the sea-reed gradually disappears. And why should it remain? Where all was once shifting it created solidity; its work is done, and the shore remains firm; let it go!

But not the sea alone has a fringe of wind-blown grasses and plumy reeds. The humid and musical margin of our rivers is bordered by a rare luxuriance of aromatic plants, quivering rushes, and fragrant flowering grasses, from whose entangled profuseness rises in coquettish spirals the flexible vine of the wild smilax, and the frail looking clematis, whose capricious festoons often bridge one tree to the other either with wreaths of white blossoms or with the smoky clouds of its blonde hair. And if the stream is amber-clear, and you can look to its bottom, you will see grasses and flowers planted under the water; beds of yellow irises and large purple violets.

The common river-reed should not be overlooked, for on summer nights, when the moon is full and calmly broods over the sleep of earth, it sighs so softly, and so plaintively whispers, that one could easily believe it held imprisoned the soul of Arethusa. Millions of water-insects go through the glittering revelry of their hurried life among the river-reeds, or, on wings transparent as air and brilliant like the sun, they rise in swarms about them. And the fire-fly suddenly flits and flashes between their darkened leaves, as if sent, spirit-like, only to pass before us and vanish forever.

Several hair-grasses, such as the whorl grass (avia aquatica), or the turfy grass, are found among the bushes and thick mosses close to river-banks, or run in bluish tints into the brooks.

But the pasture-land of our moist meadows is enriched by a multitude of grasses, so similar in appearance, and so impossible to describe in any intelligent manner, that we cannot pass them in review, one by one. To do that, only a dry and pedantic nomenclature would prove sufficient; we are already too much in subjection to that terrible accuracy of knowledge which disturbs, if it does not destroy, the poetical sense in our minds, to yield even to the semblance of learning. We would rather have a simple peasant initiate us into the secrets of the fields by the intuition of his poetical instincts, and be introduced by his untutored mind to the mysterious virtues of plants and grasses, which a long acquaintance has fully revealed to him, and which symbolize to him potent influences.

The peasant or mountaineer of Europe does not know a single Latin name, nor has he ever heard that the things that grow at his feet, the grass he always has seen and the flowers he always has known, have Latin names; but the names he gives them, and to which they answer in his mobile imagination, are the expression of that primitive poetry breathed by every man who belongs to Nature.

The mythology of Greece was born of it; and if to-day we no more believe in the sleep of nymphs by river-banks, or in the sport of fawns around their surprised beauty, our woods and our valleys still retain a lingering echo of those vanished dreams which in our poetical moods we hear in all the subtle harmonies of the wind or of running brooks.

Some of the most common herbs of the mountains of Europe are held sacred