bbock, _Flowers and Insects_.

[21] _Flowers, Fruits, and Leaves._

CHAPTER V

WOODS AND FIELDS

"By day or by night, summer or winter, beneath trees the heart
feels nearer to that depth of life which the far sky means. The
rest of spirit, found only in beauty, ideal and pure, comes
there because the distance seems within touch of thought."

JEFFERIES.

CHAPTER V

WOODS AND FIELDS

Rural life, says Cicero, "is not delightful by reason of cornfields only
and meadows, and vineyards and groves, but also for its gardens and
orchards, for the feeding of cattle, the swarms of bees, and the variety
of all kinds of flowers." Bacon considered that a garden is "the
greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and
palaces are but gross handyworks, and a man shall ever see, that when
ages grow to civility and elegancy men come to build stately sooner than
to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection."

No doubt "the pleasure which we take in a garden is one of the most
innocent delights in human life."[22] Elsewhere there may be scattered
flowers, or sheets of colour due to one or two species, but in gardens
one glory follows another. Here are brought together all the

quaint enamelled eyes,
That on the green turf sucked the honeyed showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk rose, and the well attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.[23]

We cannot, happily we need not try to, contrast or compare the beauty of
gardens with that of woods and fields.

And yet to the true lover of Nature wild flowers have a charm which no
garden can equal. Cultivated plants are but a living herbarium. They
surpass, no doubt, the dried specimens of a museum, but, lovely as they
are, they can be no more compared with the natural vegetation of our
woods and fields than the captives in the Zoological Gardens with the
same wild species in their native forests and mountains.

Often indeed, our woods and fields rival gardens even in the richness of
colour. We have all seen meadows white with Narcissus, glowing with
Buttercups, Cowslips, early p