Besides these there are others which are sustained entirely by their own means. Among them we may distinguish the black and white briony. The berries of many of these little plants are variously coloured in the different stages of their growth—yellow, red, and orange. All these produce their effect. The feathered seeds of the traveller's joy are also ornamental. The wild honeysuckle comes within this class; and it fully compensates for any injury it may do by the compression of the young branches, by its winding spiral coils, and by the beauty and fragrance of its flowers:
With clasping tendrils it invests the branch,
Else unadorned, with many a gay festoon,
And fragrant chaplet; recompensing well
The strength it borrows with the grace it lends.
In warm climates, where vines are the spontaneous offspring of nature, nothing can have a more pleasing effect than the forest-tree adorned with their twisting branches, hanging in rich festoons from bough to bough, and laden with fruit,—
the clusters clear
Half through the foliage seen.
In England, the hop we consider the most beautiful appendage of the hanging kind. In its rude natural state, indeed, twisting carelessly round the branches of trees, it has as good an effect as the vine. Its leaf is similar; and though its bunches are not so beautiful as the clusters of the vine, it is more accommodating, hangs more loosely, and is less extravagant in its growth.
The motion of trees is one source of considerable beauty. The waving heads of some, and the undulation of others, give a continual variety to their forms. In nature this is certainly a circumstance of great beauty:
Things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what stirs not;
and this also affords the chequered shade, formed under it by the dancing of the sunbeams among its playing leaves. This circumstance is of a very amusing nature, and is capable of being beautifully wrought up in poetry:
The chequered earth seems restless as a flood
Brushed by the winds. So sportive is the light,
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,
And darkening and enlightening (as the leaves
Play wanton) every part.