“The ditches of a fen so near the ocean,” says the poet, in the note which accompanies this passage, “are lined with irregular patches of a coarse-stained laver; a muddy sediment rests on the horse-tail and other perennial herbs which in part conceal the shallowness of the stream; a fat-leaved, pale-flowering scurvy-grass appears early in the year, and the razor-edged bullrush in the summer and autumn. The fen itself has a dark and saline herbage: there are rushes and _arrow-head_; and in a few patches the flakes of the cotton-grass are seen, but more commonly the _sea-aster_, the dullest of that numerous and hardy genus; a _thrift_, blue in flower, but withering, and remaining withered till the winter scatters it; the _salt-wort_, both simple and shrubby; a few kinds of grass changed by the soil and atmosphere; and low plants of two or three denominations, undistinguished in the general view of scenery;—such is the vegetation of the fen where it is at a small distance from the ocean.” And such are the descriptions of Crabbe, at once a poet and a botanist. In referring to the blue tint exhibited in salt-fens by the pink-colored flower of the _thrift_, (_Statice Armeria_,) he might have added, that the general green of the terrestrial vegetation likewise assumes, when subjected to those modified marine influences under which plants of the land can continue to live, a decided tinge of blue. It is further noticeable, that the general brown of at least the larger algæ presents, as they creep upwards upon the beach to meet with these, a marked tinge of yellow. The prevailing brown of the one flora approximates towards yellow,—the prevailing green of the other towards blue; and thus, instead of mutually merging into some neutral tint, they assume at their line of meeting directly antagonistic hues.