Art. 9.-THE MUSIC OF WILDFLOWERS. 1. The Poet Gray as a Naturalist. By Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Goodspeed, 1903. 2. George Crabbe. MSS. in possession of Mr John Murray. 3. Charles Kingsley; His Letters and Life. Edited by his wife. Two vols. 4. Life and Letters of F. J. A. Hort. millan, 1896. Memories of his 5. Life and Letters of Edward Byles Cowell. Macmillan, 1904. 6. Lord Lister. By G. T. Wrench, M.D. Fisher Unwin, 1913. DR ARNOLD of Rugby used to say, 'Wildflowers are my music.' He found in wildflowers, not indeed in the scientific study of botany but in the simple love of our wayside flora, that refreshment and recreation which many persons find in music. I cannot perceive,' he wrote to a friend with reference to music, what to others is a keen source of pleasure; but on the other hand there are many men who cannot enter into the deep delight with which I look at wood anemones or wood-sorrel.' One great charm associated with his beloved home of Fox How, between Rydal and Ambleside, was the abundance of wildflowers. He loved them, he used to say, 'as a child loves them.' To many other distinguished men, besides the great Headmaster of Rugby, have wildflowers been the music of their lives. It is proposed in the present paper to consider a few signal illustrations of this fascinating recreation, which has appealed alike to poets and philosophers and men of letters, as well as to individuals of a more scientific attitude of mind. Among philosophers who found in wildflowers the solace and refreshment of their lives, two notable names may be recalled, those of Jean Jacques Rousseau and of John Stuart Mill. Readers of Rousseau's Confessions will remember the many allusions to the pursuit of botany which beguiled, especially in his later years, so many hours of the unhappy philosopher's life. He often regretted that, as a young man, he had not availed himself of the companionship of one Claude Anet, who, like himself, was an inmate of the household of Madame de Warens, and who, in his herbalising expeditions in the neighbourhood of Chambéry, would return home laden with rare and interesting plants. But, at that time, Rousseau considered botany as only 'a fit study for an apothecary.' Claude Anet unfortunately died of a pleurisy, caught while botanising in the Alps, and the chance of becoming an excellent botanist' was lost to the philosopher. But in after years he became, as he tells us, 'passionately devoted' to the study of plants, which filled up his leisure hours, and in pursuit of which he would wander for miles along the countryside, 'without a weary moment.' During his sojourn in the Isle St Pierre, a lovely spot in the middle of the Lake of Bienne, he seems to have devoted most of his time to his favourite hobby. The different soils into which the island, although little, was divided, offered,' he writes in his Confessions, 'a sufficient variety of plants for the study and amusement of my whole life. I was determined not to leave a blade of grass without examination, and I began to take measures for making, with an immense collection of observations, a Flora Petrinsularis.' The persecution, however, to which Rousseau was subjected, followed him to his beloved retreat; and before long he received notice from the authorities to quit the island without delay. To his intense grief and indignation he was forced to obey, and the projected Flora was never compiled. It will doubtless come as a surprise to many persons to learn that the author of 'Principles of Political Economy' was an ardent field-botanist. When, as a lad of fifteen, he paid a visit to Sir Samuel Bentham at his house in the South of France, he made friends with his host's only son, George, afterwards the author of the well-known 'Handbook of the British Flora'; and it was under his influence that John Stuart Mill became a 'searcher after simples.' For many years, after he had entered the India Office, Mill was accustomed to spend his Sundays in long botanical rambles in the neighbourhood of London, while his annual holiday was usually passed in the same pursuit. Surrey and Hampshire were the chief spheres of his researches, and in these counties Vol. 227.-No. 451. 2 G he made many interesting discoveries, which he was wont to chronicle in the pages of 'The Phytologist.' It is interesting to search the numbers of this botanical miscellany for the contributions of J. S. Mill. He seems to have been the first discoverer in Surrey of the beautiful American balsam, Impatiens fulva, which he found growing sparingly on the banks of the Wey near Guildford. At Guildford too, in the great chalk quarries, he found the historic woad, concerning which Cæsar saith,' in the quaint language of Gerard, 'that all the Brittons do colour themselves with woad, which giveth a blew color.' Both these plants still flourish abundantly in the localities where Mill found them. The same cannot, unfortunately, be said of the magnificent Royal fern, Osmunda regalis, which Mill tells us grew in some swamps near Dorking, so as to form large and tall thickets visible at a great distance'; or of the very rare man-orchis, Aceras anthropophora, which he found 'growing profusely on Colley and Buckland Hills and between Box Hill and Juniper Hill.' When on a visit to the Isle of Wight, Mill noticed on the shore of Sandown Bay a single specimen of the purple spurge, the only record of this extraordinarily scarce plant in the Island. The specimen is still preserved, the most interesting, alike for its rarity and on account of its finder, in the Bromfield collection of Island-plants. After the death of his wife at Avignon in 1859, Mill bought a cottage near to the place of her burial, and there he mainly resided during the remainder of his life. He found some consolation in his love of wildflowers, and busied himself in gathering together materials for a Flora of Avignon.' Only three days before his death he walked over fifteen miles in search of some rare species. His herbarium of British plants he bequeathed to the museum at Kew. Passing from philosophers to poets, we should not unnaturally expect to find among the latter a larger number of individuals interested in our native flora. Our literature abounds in passages in which the praises of the countryside are sung. And yet, apparently, but few of our poets cared for the pursuit of herbalising. There are many interesting allusions to wildflowers in the plays of Shakespeare, and in the poems of Milton, but they are more or less of a literary character. Neither Thomson, who in his 'Seasons' revived the poetry of nature, nor Wordsworth, though he celebrated the Daisy and the Celandine and the Daffodil, nor Cowper, though he recognised the intimate charm of country-life, nor Keble, in spite of his stanzas to the Snowdrop, can be regarded in any sense as field-botanists. There are, however, a few exceptions, among whom may be mentioned John Clare the peasant-poet of Northamptonshire, Thomas Gray and George Crabbe, Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson. There is no more pathetic figure in English literature than that of John Clare, of Helpstone, who passed the earlier portion of his life in abject poverty, and the latter part in the prison-house of an asylum. But such happiness as at times was vouchsafed to him was due entirely to his love of nature, and especially of wildflowers. Of Tennyson's interest in things botanical it is unnecessary to speak. His poems contain numberless passages which illustrate his close acquaintance with our wayside flora. Now it is a flower in the crannied wall'; now the golden hour' of the dark yew, when flower is feeling after flower'; now 'the faint, sweet cuckoo-flower' or the 'blue forget-me-not'; and now 'the fruit which in our winter woodland looks a flower.' What more striking description of an English wood in May, when the bluebells or wild-hyacinths are a 'paradise of blossom,' than these lines in Guinevere' 6 'sheets of hyacinth That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth'! Or we call to mind the exquisite spring-picture in the In Memoriam ' 'Now fades the last long streak of snow, About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow'; or the following lines which, in the same poem, reveal the poet's longing for the flowers of spring 'Dip down upon the northern shore, O sweet new-year delaying long; 'Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, But it is probably unknown to most readers of the famous 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' that the favourite study of the poet Gray, during the last ten years of his life, was the study of natural history. After the manner of Gilbert White, who, unknown to the poet, was making similar observations at Selborne, Gray kept a calendar in which he noted the opening of flowers and the arrival of birds. Thus, on Feb. 12, 1763, crocuses and hepatica were blossoming through the snow in the garden of Pembroke College, Cambridge; on Feb. 21 the first white butterfly appeared; on March 5 he heard the thrush sing, and a few days later the skylark. In botany he took a special interest. He studied the subject in Hudson's Flora Anglica,' and in the 'Systema Naturae' of Linnæus. A copy of this latter work, the 10th edition, published in 1758, Gray had interleaved; and this volume, with voluminous notes, and beautifully illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches, eventually came into the possession of Mr Ruskin. On Ruskin's death this copy passed to Mrs Arthur Severn, who presented it to Charles Eliot Norton. Mr Norton showed his appreciation of the gift by publishing in America a little volume entitled 'The Poet Gray as a Naturalist,' in which he presents us with a selection of Gray's notes and with facsimiles of some of the pages. The notes, written in a small, clear handwriting, reveal the poet's accuracy and power of observation, while the sketches illustrate the excellence of his drawings, especially of birds and insects. This interleaved copy of Linnæus remains the chief memorial of Gray's occupation during the last few years of his life. Mr Norton does not tell us what became of the poet's copy of Hudson's Flora,' the discovery of which would indeed be an interesting one. So many are the allusions to wildflowers in Crabbe's poems that readers of 'The Borough' and 'The Tales' would naturally infer that the poet must have been a botanist. And the conclusion is abundantly confirmed |