This is the most beautiful and conspicuous of all the wild flowers I saw,—a spire of large purple bells rising above the ferns and copses and along the hedges everywhere. Among the copses of Surrey and Hants, I saw it five feet high, and amid the rocks of North Wales still higher. We have no conspicuous wild flower that compares with it. It is so showy and abundant that the traveler on the express train cannot miss it; while the pedestrian finds it lining his way like rows of torches. The bloom creeps up the stalk gradually as the season advances, taking from a month to six weeks to go from the bottom to the top, making at all times a most pleasing gradation of color, and showing the plant each day with new flowers and a fresh, new look. It never looks shabby and spent, from first to last. The lower buds open the first week in June, and slowly the purple wave creeps upward; bell after bell swings to the bee and moth, till the end of July, when you see the stalk waving in the wind with two or three flowers at the top, as perfect and vivid as those that opened first. I wonder the poets have not mentioned it oftener. Tennyson speaks of "the foxglove spire." I note this allusion in Keats:—
"Where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell,"
and this from Coleridge:—
"The fox-glove tall
Sheds its loose purple bells or in the gust,
Or when it bends beneath the upspringing lark,
Or mountain finch alighting."
Coleridge perhaps knew that the lark did not perch upon the stalk of the foxglove, or upon any other stalk or branch, being entirely a ground bird and not a percher, but he would seem to imply that it did, in these lines.
A London correspondent calls my attention to these lines from Wordsworth,—