ong the Arctic lands, and of cold
which isolated them once more. Yet doubtless these humble movements
of our local plants may be laying up results as important, and may
hereafter supply evidence of earth's changes upon some smaller scale.

May expands to its prime of beauty; the summer birds come with the
fruit-blossoms, the gardens are deluged with bloom and the air with
melody, while in the woods the timid spring-flowers fold themselves away
in silence and give place to a brighter splendor. On the margin of some
quiet swamp a myriad of bare twigs seem suddenly overspread with purple
butterflies, and we know that the Rhodora is in bloom. Wordsworth never
immortalized a flower more surely than Emerson this, and it needs no
weaker words; there is nothing else in which the change from nakedness
to beauty is so sudden, and when you bring home the great mass of
blossoms they appear all ready to flutter away again from your hands and
leave you disenchanted.

At the same time the beautiful Cornel-tree is in perfection; startling
as a tree of the tropics, it flaunts its great flowers high up among the
forest-branches, intermingling its long slender twigs with theirs, and
garnishing them with alien blooms. It is very available for household
decoration, with its four great creamy petals,--flowers they are not,
but floral involucres,--each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip,
as if the fireflies had alighted on them and scorched them; and yet I
like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate
green of young Maples. And beneath it grows often its more abundant
kinsman, the Dwarf Cornel, with the same four great petals enveloping
its floral cluster, but lingering low upon the ground,--an herb whose
blossoms mimic the statelier tree.

The same rich creamy hue and texture show themselves in the Wild Calla,
which grows at this season in dark, sequestered water-courses, and
sometimes well rivals, in all but size, that superb whiteness out of
a land of darkness, the Ethiopic Calla of the conservatory. At this
season, too, we seek another semi-aquatic rarity, whose homely name
cannot deprive it of a certain garden-like elegance, the Buckbean. This
is one of the shy plants which yet grow in profusion within their own
domain. I have found it of old in Cambridge, and then upon the pleasant
shallows of the Artichoke, that loveliest tributary of the Merrimack,
and I have never seen it where it occupied a patch more