"the fruit

Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.”

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This is the brilliant coral red of the spindle-tree (Euonymus europæus). There are sounds also as well as sights; the trees grate against one another, "old boughs whine in the woods," or "In Memoriam" has it-a 'gride" as wonderful word, with the full sound of the Virgilian "stridere." One of the most striking sights of autumn is the mass of grayish-white presented by the seed of the travellers' joy (Clematis vitalba), popularly "old man's beard," which covers some trees and hedges. Tennyson has noticed it in his cottage, "parcel-bearded with the traveller's joy," and

"oaken stock in winter woods, O'erflowered with the hoary clematis." Other creepers are well represented. The woodbine (Milton's eglantine) is a commonplace among poets, and doubtless owes its popularity among them to the beauty of its two names, woodbine and honeysuckle. Like another modern poet, Tennyson has marked its especially sweet smell at night, to which the present writer can fully testify, in the Idylls—

"Good Lord! how sweetly smells the honeysuckle in the hush'd night.' The large white convolvulus or bindweed (Convolvulus major) is coupled with the briony

"Made tremble in the hedge the fragile bindweed bells and briony rings." His description of the convolvulus is but too correct it is no use to pick it, for it fades almost immediately. The briony lasts better, and with its vinelike tendrils (Tennyson justly calls it thebriony vine") makes a beautiful ornament for decorative purposes in the autumn, when it supplies at once beautiful leaves of a red-purple, young shoots of brilliant green, and red berries.

Though all the effects of Nature (see "The Progress of Spring" for much delicate observation and description) are well known to our author, there are two which seem from their frequent recurrence in his pages to be foremost in his mind-the effects of light and shade, and green brilliancies of all NEW SERIES.-VOL. LX., No. 6.

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"interchange of dark and bright, checker-work of beam and shade," and (in the Idylls) never light and shade coursed one another more on open ground."

For green I would quote "a fancy as bracken amid the gloom of the heathsummer new, As the green of the er;" "The damp hill slopes were quickened into green, And the live green had kindled into flowers;" 66 thro lush green grasses burned The red anemone where now the seamnew pipes or dives, In yonder greening gleam;" "the green gleam of dewy-tasselled trees."

To turn now to garden shrubs and plants, though it is hard to leave much unmentioned of this quality—

"That beech will gather brown,

This maple burn itself away."

Tennyson speaks of "a skin as clean and white as privet when it flowers,' and truly the privet with its prim leaves and small white flowers looks a very Puritan for neatness and simplicity. References to the flowers of our gardens of course abound, and many will occur at once to the Tennyson reader. The rose and the lily play more than a commonplace part in "Maud," where indeed all the flowers are interested spectators of the drama. Passages such as

'A walk of roses ran from door to door,

A walk of lilies crost it to the bower,"

from the Idylls, might have been written by many others; and bell flowers, though we may be grateful to Teunyson for preserving the old fashioned name "Canterbury bells," are easily paralleled from many poets. Perhaps the beautiful line, "Love like an Alpine harebell hung with tears," deserves an especial mention; he has written a poem to the snowdrop, which is styled

February-fair-maid," and it forms a fitting part of his picture of "St. AgnesEve," which, as W. E. Henley has pointed out, is so dazzlingly pure in its whiteness, and a contrast to Keats brilliantly-colored poem on the same

subject. Of the early spring, with its violets, primroses, and crocuses, our poet is never tired, and has avowed his especial love for April, being an Elizabethan in this as in many other things, so that it is surprising to find comparatively little mention of the daffodil. It is hardly to be found anywhere except in "Maud," and "the sonnet to the Nineteenth Century"-" Here in this roaming moon of daffodil and crocus. "Perhaps Tennyson felt that it had been so fully celebrated elsewhere as to become hackneyed, in spite of all its beauty. However this may be, he has no such feelings about the violet, which appears every where, in many delightful passages. Many will remember the beautiful—

66 my regret Becomes an April violet,

And buds and blossoms like the rest."

Another passage from " In Memoriam'' (canto xviii.)

"And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land,"

offers a curious problem. Such an expression as that in "Aylmer's Field,"

Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave,' is natural, but to make the plant spring from the dead body itself is hardly so obvious. There are two passages to which we can refer for a parallel. Hamlet (V. i.) has—

"And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!"

Keats' "Pot of Basil," as he was certainly much under the influence of that poet in his earlier time. When a writer bas suggested that "a cheek of apple blossom" (surely the most obvious of figures) is one of Tennyson's debts to Theocritus, one may well pause before indulging a taste for discovering correspondencies!

The rarity of very dark flowers in Nature has been remarked, and we find noted, as Milton does in "Lycidas," the dark, almost black heartsease in eyes darker than darkest pansies.' The expression "crocus-purple hour," in the Demeter volume, is also probably a Latinism, meaning bright with crocus, without necessary reference to the color purple, as the Latin " purpureus" is used of any bright and brilliant color. Those who have been in Greece will appreciate the lines in "A Dream of Fair Women"-" thro' lush green grasses burn'd the red anemone" it is of course to be seen in our gardens, but not in the brilliant and startling red masses which it forms in its wild free state. I pass by many other descriptions of "the flaming crocus, "the purple-spiked lavender," deep tulips dashed with fiery dew," but cannot omit the praise of the laburnum. All readers will recall the ex

quisite" laburnums, dropping wells of fire" of "In Memoriam;" the gold

from each laburnum chain" of the Demeter volume is equally happy. As an instance of his remarkable observa

uunc non e manibus illis, Nunc non e tumulo, fortunataque favilla Nascentur violæ," which is still closer to the "In Memoriam" passage. Knowing the classics and Shakespeare as Tennyson did, he may have gone to either for his phrase; of course Shakespeare and Tennyson may both have known and copied the passage from Persius, who doubtless derived his idea from the Greek anthologists; but these references to special prototypes are easily overdone, as a recent writer has shown us. Perhaps one may hazard a third suggestion, that Tennyson may have derived what is unusual in the idea the growth of a flower from the actual body-from

nary eyes, indeed to botanical authorities the quince has large white flowers, but the poet sees deeper and better

"As light a flush As hardly tints the blossom of the quince."

There is abundance of material for quotation and comment among the wild flowers. The water-meadows of England are one of her greatest charms, and the water-plants yield to none in color and beauty. Here we find the water-lily frequently; the manyknotted water-flags," which Shelley was as fond of as Tennyson; the meadowsweet, the praise of which George Meredith has made his own in Richard Feverel," the forget-me-not (Myosotis palustris) with a clearer blue

than its garden brother; and the "matted cress" over which the brook "loves to purl," though at times it rises above the water to make "cressy islets white with flower."

Two plants equally familiar to those who roum by country brooks and old water-mills are the willow-weed and mallow, though, except by Tennyson, they are rarely mentioned in poetry. The willow-weed or willow-herb (Epilobium hirsutum) in July and August forms brilliant masses of red on the borders of our streams, or in them, and has delicately fragrant leaves. The water-mallow is also scented of musk, and its pale red blossoms are much prettier than those of its dusty roadside brother (Malva arvensis) with its somewhat coarse purple. "The wild marshmarigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray" according to our author, and certainly its brightness at a season when color is rather wanting deserves an encomium: it fills many a gap in the May-garlands which still flourish, on the first of May, in the little villages of Oxfordshire. At the same season the cuckoo-flower, or lady's smock, raises its pale purple, almost white blossoms in the meadows. Tennyson speaks of "faint sweet cuckooflowers," but the smell is very faint indeed, if any.

Passing by many references to bluebells, cowslips, "wild-wood" hyacinths, white anemones, which the Northern farmer calls "woild 'enemies," and the "long-purples" about which Shakespearian commentators dispute, one must mention two or three especially felicitous phrases such as "the frail bluebell peereth over rare broidery of the purple clover," "the dull-blooded poppy-stem," with its "flower hued with the scarlet of a fierce sunrise,' "the little speed well's darling blue" a blue as small and bright as is the red of the tiny pimpernel. There is a fine. description in the Idylls of the cloth of gold which

"Shone far off, as shines

A field of charlock in the sudden sun
Between two showers.'

Here again Tennyson has chosen to use the popular name: the yellow mustard (Sinapis arvensis) popularly called charlock, cherlock, or kerlick, is a

common sight all the summer through in the cornfields, often swamping the legitimate occupant to the farmer's ruin, but forming a show quite brilliant enough to suggest the poet's comparison.

In "The Promise of May" Tennyson has given a list of blue flowers, "bluebell, harebell, speed well, bluebottle, succory, forget-me-not," a list which few poets could perhaps have made so complete. The bluebottle is more correctly the corn flower, and succory (which Emerson calls succory to match the sky") the chicory which is used to adulterate cheap coffee. In the Idylls, Enid is "a ragged-robin from the hedge" picked by the prince. The name "ragged-robin" is applied to two plants, but here doubtless means the tiny red geranium (Geranium Robertianum) whose graceful, almost fernlike foliage, and small but bright crimson blossoms peep out between the interstices of hedges; the ragged-robin proper is also rosy-red in color, but a marsh plant, and not, as far as I have noticed, found in hedges, but in the open. For the ordinary observer, the dog rose (Rosa canina), with its delicate pink flowers, is the only wild rose, as the sweet-briar is hardly a wild plant, but there is another common rose, the trailing dog-rose (Rosa arvensis) which is smaller than the common dog-rose, and bears white blossoms with a brilliant yellow centre. This is the rose Tennyson means by his "wild white rose" and "bramble roses faint and pale.' This year the gorse is so brilliant, in spite of many attacks on it by errant golfers, that one needs to the full his

"Furzy prickle fires the dells,"

to express its glories. But I must leave inany other passages I should like to quote, for the grasses are also noted

the darnel on the clay," the "bearded grass on the chalk hill"-and conclude my paper with a few instances of flower metaphors; nowhere is the poet's touch more sure, or his effect more felicitous, than in many passages of this sort. The little poem of The Flower," which the poet planted and the people called a weed, only to steal the seed when they saw how fair it was,

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THERE is nothing which more constantly presses itself upon our attention, and that in an almost infinite variety of ways, than the existence of motion. Whether we stand upon the sea-shore or far inland by wood or stream, whether we take our station on hilltop or plain, and fix our gaze upon the heavens above or upon the earth beneath, we are always conscious of something moving. Even on the stillest summer night we may see the shooting star, or hear the shiver of the aspenleaves, and failing even this, the beating of our own hearts and the rhythm of our own breathing are still perceptible to us. These forms of motion appeal directly to our senses; a child or a savage may be conscious of them, but those in whom "knowledge grows from more to more," gradually come to understand that the motion immediately perceptible to the senses is but a very small portion of that continually going on in the universe. We learn that the earth is not at rest beneath our feet, that the fixed stars" are not at rest

in the firmament, that the molecules in a bar of iron, or an expanse of still water, or an imprisoned gas, are not at rest among themselves; finally, that for every thought of our minds and every sensation of our bodies, a corresponding change takes place in the motion of the molecules of our brains, changes whose intricacy defies the utmost penetration of science to unravel. The majesty of motion is chiefly brought home to us by contemplating the stately march of the heavenly bodies; but the ubiquity and versatility of motion, its living and transforming power, by considering those marvellous inter-molecular actions which science is just beginning to spell out, and which, whether their result be the formation of a crystal, of a plant, or of the human form divine," appeal with almost equal force to our reverence and delight. All growth, all development are due to motion; without it there would be neither sound nor light, neither heat nor vitality; and could we conceive

the existence of matter without motion, we might then justly bestow upon it the epithet which science has so definitely taught us to discard-dead. As it is, every change in cloud or flame, in sunset skies or in the face of friends, is a continual reminder of the existence of that intangible, all-pervading thing which we call motion.

Having regard to the enormous variety of results, it is almost a matter of surprise to find that there exist but three distinct forms of motion, which either singly or in combination are answerable for all the effects produced. These three, defined with reference to solid bodies, are (1) Motion of translation, such as that of a bird on the wing, or of the earth in her orbit. (2) Motion of rotation, such as that of a spinning-top or of the earth on her axis. (3) Motion of vibration, such as that of a pendulum or of the water particles in a wave. Without entering into the separate consideration of these forms of motion, we will pass in review those general properties which belong to motion as such, and are not peculiar to any one of its forms.

In the first place, it is communicable. This, like many other familiar facts, seems at first sight too obvious to need mention, and too commonplace to repay investigation; yet it is remarkable enough, and quite inexplicable in the present stage of scientific knowledge. At a game of bowls or of croquet, we see a moving ball hit another, which is immediately set in motion also; or in a piece of mechanism we see the rotation of one wheel used to set in rotation another, or perhaps many others, and this seems to us a most "natural" proceeding, as indeed it is, but none the less mysterious for that; for in what consists the change which has passed upon the second ball or wheel, and how are we to define it? There has been no alteration in composition, nor gain in weight; simply the body has received power to do that which it could not do before-move, and the "laws of motion," which will presently come under our consideration, though they "completely define and describe" all changes of motion in moving bodies, give no explanation whatever of its initiation or communication. This is

at present a secret of nature to which science has found no "Open Sesame." In the second place, so far as we know, motion only originates from motion. Very ordinary observations are sufficient to verify this fact approximately. In the case of the balls but now referred to, the first ball was possessed of a certain quantity of motion,* some of which was communicated to the second ball; and this communication was really a giving up, for because of it the first ball must come to rest sooner than it would otherwise have done. That which it has given, however, was first imparted to it. It did not evolve the motion from itself, but received it from another moving ball, or by a blow from hand or foot, or in some other way it was first propelled upon its course by an external agent; and that agent itself owed the motion it communicated to some other antecedent motion, and so on indefinitely. Even in the case where a human being apparently originates his own motion by an act of will, and by an act of will imparts it, as when he raises his arm and flings a ball into the air, a little closer inquiry will show that he has not in fact originated any motion at all; he has only directed the form which it shall finally take. The power of raising his arm is due to the power of muscular contraction, which is of course motion; the muscles are stimulated to action by the nerves, these by the brain, and the stimulus in each case is that of communicated motion. The molecules of the brain itself are continually undergoing change, and change is inseparable from motion. The processes of digestion, circulation, assimilation, on which the possibility of these changes depends, are all processes of motion, and they are enabled to take place by the food which enters the body, and which, whether animal or vegetable, whether prepared by man cr in a "natural" state, has previously undergone an incalculable number of changes, each the result of motion, and dependent ultimately on the reception,

* Quantity of motion is a somewhat ambiguous term; the more accurate expression would be momentum, which is the product of the mass into the velocity.