Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/255

157 for in these days a considerable share of metrical celebrity is awarded to the sentimental favourite of modern Poetasters, the ; which, delicate, and dear, and beautiful as it is, the indiscriminate eulogy and fashionable preeminence, now given to it, serve to render less pure and poetical in the eyes of the true votaries of Nature and Romance than many a yet unpraised flower. The very libellous portraits, or rather caricatures, of this fair favourite, exhibited in Albums and graphic delineations of all grades, with the universal spirit for "illustrating" the said libels, suggested the rather unromantic lines accompanying the plate in the present volume.

The Myosotis Palustris, Great Water Scorpion Grass, or true Forget-me-not, grows very abundantly beside most of our running brooks and rivers, the roots being chiefly in the loose watery mud of the banks. The flowers, which are of a delicate blue, appear in June and July; the leaves are smooth, without hairs on any part, and of a bright light green. I thus describe the features of the real Forget-me-not, because other species are continually being mistaken for the true one. Among other instances of this, the illustrator of a recent serious work on Flowers, although professedly a botanical draughtsman, gives the Myosotis Alpestris instead of the M. Palustris, and so exaggerates the hairy surface of the leaves that they seem equipped in winter clothing from some fairy-furriers. The rough-leaved Scorpion Grasses are found in sandy fields, on mountains, &c.; and a very minute kind flourishes in beautiful little tufts on old walls and ruins. The very origin of the name establishes the Myosotis Palustris as the real owner