Page:The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated.djvu/371

237 consequential expression, are unsealed, and the bells gossip of their honey secrets to every wandering wind.

"The green and graceful " I have grouped with the Foxglove in the illustrative plate; for where we meet one, we generally find the other. Foxgloves and Fern have so constantly been associated in my Autumn garlands, that I never think of dissolving their partnership of beauty: indeed, both would suffer by separation. Dearly as I have, from childhood, loved the Fern, yet now it is yet more welcome; for it always recalls to my mind's eye a magnificent scene, to which it added peculiar beauty.

In the neighbourhood of a friend's house at which I was visiting, in Bedfordshire, was (and I hope still is) a grand oak wood. The trees, of unusual height in England, were remarkably erect and pillar-like, as if grown "to be the masts of some great ammirals." They sprung into the air, seeming to support the very clouds; and with their dense mass of foliage spread like a roof above, and stately trunks, like columns standing round, with here and there a distant avenue offering a peep of sunlit meadow scenery, the place might well appear a glorious temple framed by Nature's hand. Beneath waved an ocean of Fern, so high, that when walking on the ground we had a verdant wall, or rather arcade, on each side, reaching far above the head of an ordinary-sized person. But in some places trees had recently been felled, and by climbing upon their prostrate trunks and branches, and looking over the Fern, we gained a scene of