If we turn to the vegetable world, what a profusion of beauty do we find! Exquisite are the tiny Mosses, when the fogs and rains of winter, so inimical to other vegetation, have quickened them into verdure and fruit. How they spread along the hedgerow banks in soft fleeces of vivid emerald, and shoot up their slender stalks, each crowned with its tiny urn, and wearing its fairy nightcap! Beautiful are the tiny dark-green feather-like leaves of the Forkmoss crowded on the clayey bank; beautiful the wild sprays of the plumy Hypnum; and beautiful the little round velvet cushions of Tortula, that grow on every old wall-top.
"The tiny moss, whose silken verdure clothes
The time-worn rock, and whose bright capsules rise,
Like fairy urns, on stalks of golden sheen,
Demand our admiration and our praise,
As much as cedar kissing the blue sky
Or Krubul's giant-flower. God made them all,
And what He deigns to make should ne'er be deem'd
Unworthy of our study."
Exquisite too are the Ferns, in their arching fronds, so richly cut in elegant tracery. See a fine crown of the Lady Fern in a shaded Devonshire lane, and confess that grace and beauty are triumphant there. And in the saturated atmosphere of the tropical islands, where these lovely plants form a very large proportion of the entire vegetation, and some of them rise on slender stems thirty or forty feet in altitude, from the summit of which the wide-spreading fronds arch gracefully on every side, like a vast umbrella of twinkling verdure, through whose filagree work the sunbeams are sparkling,—what can be more charming than Ferns?
The queenly Palms, too, are models of stately beauty. Linnæus called them vegetabilium principes; and, when we see them in some noble conservatory of adequate dimensions, such as the glass palm-house at Kew, crowded side by side, with their crowned heads, and lofty stature, and proud, erect bearing, we are involuntarily reminded of the monarchs of many kingdoms met in august conclave.
"Lo! higher still the stately palm-trees rise,
Chequering the clouds with their unbending stems,
And o'er the clouds, amid the dark-blue skies,
Lifting their rich unfading diadems.
How calm and placidly they rest
Upon the heaven's indulgent breast,
As if their branches never breeze had known!
Light bathes them aye in glancing showers,
And Silence, 'mid their lofty bowers,
Sits on her moveless throne."
Are the Grasses worthy of mention for their beauty? Surely, yes. Many of them display a downy lightness exquisitely lovely, as the common Feather-grass. The golden panicles of the great Quake-grass, so curiously compacted and hanging in stalks of so hair-like a tenuity as to nod and tremble with the slightest motion, how beautiful are these! And the satiny plumes of the Pampas-grass projecting from the clump of leaves form a fine object. But the Bamboos, those great arborescent Grasses of the tropics, form a characteristic feature of the vegetation of those regions, of almost unexampled magnificence. I have seen them in their glory, and can sympathise with the philosophical Humboldt in the powerful effect which the grandeur of the Bamboo produces on the poetic mind. It is an object never to be forgotten, especially when growing in those isolated clumps, that look like tufts of ostrich-plumes magnified to colossal dimensions. A thousand of these noble reeds standing in close array, each four or five inches in the diameter of its stem, and rising in erect dignity to the height of forty feet, and all waving their tufted summits in diverging curves moved by every breeze,—form, indeed, a magnificent spectacle. Growing in the most rocky situations, the Bamboo is frequently planted in Jamaica on the very apex of those conical hills which form so remarkable a feature in the landscape of the interior, and to which its noble tufts constitute a most becoming crown.
Mr Ellis thus describes the elegance of these magnificent Grasses in Madagascar:—
"The base of the hills and the valleys were covered with the Bamboo, which was far more abundant than during any former part of the journey. There were at least four distinct varieties: one a large growing kind, erect nearly to the point; a second smaller, seldom rising much above twenty feet in height, bushy at the base, and gracefully bending down its tapering point. A third kind rose in single cane, almost without a leaf, to the height of thirty feet or more; or, bending over, formed a perfectly circular arch. I also saw a Bamboo growing as a creeper, with small short joints, feathered with slender leafy branches at every joint, and stretching in festoons from tree to tree along the side of the road, or hanging suspended in single lines from a projecting branch, and swinging gently with the passing breeze. The appearance of the Bamboo when growing is exceedingly graceful. Sometimes the canes, as thick as a man's arm at the base, rise forty or fifty feet high, fringed at the joints, which are two or three feet apart, with short branches of long, lance-shaped leaves. The smaller kinds, which abound most in this region, are still more elegant; and the waving of the canes, with their attenuated but feathery-looking points, bending down like a plume, and the tremulous quivering, even in the slightest breeze, of their long, slender leaves, present ever-varying aspects of beauty; and, combined with the bright-green colour of the Bamboo-cane and leaf, impart an indescribable charm to the entire landscape."[217]
Glorious in loveliness are the Musaceæ, the Plantains and Bananas of the hot regions. Humboldt calls the Banana "one of the noblest and most lovely of vegetable productions;" and truly its enormous, flag-like leaves of the richest green, permeated by nervures running transversely in exactly parallel lines, and arching out in every direction from the succulent, spongy, sheathed stem, command our admiration, apart from the beauty of their flowers, or the importance of their fruit.