Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/720

696 our moist meadows. Tall, but elegant, it bends under the least breeze, and, seen from a distance, looks fleeting with the wind.

There is one beautiful grass, the quaking grass (briza media), a lover of wet river banks. It has a long, loose panicle, greenish-brown, and drooping to one side, and so rich in changing hues that one cannot determine whether it is gold or purple, amethyst or emerald, for, like the rainbow, it seems born of color itself. That grass waves to every wind, and at the approach of footsteps balances its flat, smooth and shining spikes. I have seen it growing very freely in Maine. Tied with flowers, it surrounds them with a quivering atmosphere, and even when dry flutters airily on the country mantel, where it reminds one of pleasant summer rambles.

Our fields do not have the cool, green color of English fields planted with barley, where myriad prickly ears, incessantly nodding and waving to and fro, assure the farmer of a rich harvest. The Romans cultivated barley as food for their cattle, their soldiers, and their gladiators. And yet no one has discovered its native land, no more than that of the oat. Both are universally used, however, either for bread by the poorer classes, or as one of the principle ingredients in the manufacture of beer. Perhaps it may remain for some enthusiastic lager bier lover to discover the hidden birth-place of his unfailing inspiration.

But, if we have not the barley growing wild everywhere, we have the sorrel, with its seed-sprays, making islands of color in our meadows and bronzing the breast of the uplands, appearing now a bright red, then a dull purple, then, again, a warm brown. Foot-travellers, weary with long tramps under a burning sun, are glad enough when they find scattered by the road-side, or spread across the meadows, the acid-flavored sorrel, whose leaf is so grateful to any one thirsty. On the coast of Malabar, the wild sorrel is much prized, not for its culinary uses only, but by women, who consider it endowed with a magic gift of beauty, and employ it as an article of toilet the moment they discover that the freshness of youth is disappearing from their complexion.

When the pale sun of spring woos the flowers from the sod, and hepaticas, anemones, and saxifrage come in troops on the edge of our woods, the violet comes also, like a benediction, upon the earth. Children love it, and old people love it for the sake of their spring days, but it is scentless, and pleases the eye only. Its European sister, the wild violet, on the contrary, fills the air with its delicious odor, just as soon as the snow leaves dry the sunny spots under hedges. Then, one by one, the whole family of violets arrive and take possession of their accustomed haunts. But, as there are about one hundred species known, it would be arduous for us to write, and for you to read, their names. One of them, however, we cannot pass by without notice. It is the little wild pansy, growing in ploughed fields, and which, on account of being tri-color, is baptized by the common people of the rural districts, The flower of the Trinity. Under such a name, could it possibly take root and find its home in the environs of Concord, we wonder?