If we turn to the vegetable world, what a profusion of beauty do we find! Exquisite are the tiny Mosses, when the fogs and rains of winter, so inimical to other vegetation, have quickened them into verdure and fruit. How they spread along the hedgerow banks in soft fleeces of vivid emerald, and shoot up their slender stalks, each crowned with its tiny urn, and wearing its fairy nightcap! Beautiful are the tiny dark-green feather-like leaves of the Forkmoss crowded on the clayey bank; beautiful the wild sprays of the plumy Hypnum; and beautiful the little round velvet cushions of Tortula, that grow on every old wall-top. "The tiny moss, whose silken verdure clothes The time-worn rock, and whose bright capsules rise, Like fairy urns, on stalks of golden sheen, Demand our admiration and our praise, As much as cedar kissing the blue sky Or Krubul's giant-flower. God made them all, And what _He_ deigns to make should ne'er be deem'd Unworthy of our study." Exquisite too are the Ferns, in their arching fronds, so richly cut in elegant tracery. See a fine crown of the Lady Fern in a shaded Devonshire lane, and confess that grace and beauty are triumphant there. And in the saturated atmosphere of the tropical islands, where these lovely plants form a very large proportion of the entire vegetation, and some of them rise on slender stems thirty or forty feet in altitude, from the summit of which the wide-spreading fronds arch gracefully on every side, like a vast umbrella of twinkling verdure, through whose filagree work the sunbeams are sparkling,--what can be more charming than Ferns? The queenly Palms, too, are models of stately beauty. Linnæus called them _vegetabilium principes_; and, when we see them in some noble conservatory of adequate dimensions, such as the glass palm-house at Kew, crowded side by side, with their crowned heads, and lofty stature, and proud, erect bearing, we are involuntarily reminded of the monarchs of many kingdoms met in august conclave. "Lo! higher still the stately palm-trees rise, Chequering the clouds with their unbending stems, And o'er the clouds, amid the dark-blue skies, Lifting their rich unfading diadems. How calm and placidly they rest Upon the heaven's indulgent breast, As if their branches never breeze had known! Light bathes them aye in glancing showers, And Silence, 'mid their lofty bowers, Sits on her moveless throne."