One afternoon, last spring, I had been
walking through a copse of young white birches,--their leaves scarce yet
apparent,--over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled
with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters
of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty. All this was
floored with last year's faded foliage, giving a singular bareness
and whiteness to the foreground. Suddenly, as if entering a cavern, I
stepped through the edge of all this, into a dark little amphitheatre
beneath a hemlock-grove, where the afternoon sunlight struck broadly
through the trees upon a tiny stream and a miniature swamp,--this last
being intensely and luridly green, yet overlaid with the pale gray of
last year's reeds, and absolutely flaming with the gayest yellow light
from great clumps of cowslips. The illumination seemed perfectly weird
and dazzling; the spirit of the place appeared live, wild, fantastic,
almost human. Now open your Tennyson:--
"_And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire
in swamps and hollows gray_."
Our cowslip is the English marsh-marigold.
History is a grander poetry, and it is often urged that the features of
Nature in America must seem tame because they have no legendary wreaths
to decorate them.
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