Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 | Page 4

upon us with a united impulse; you may search for them day after day in vain, but the day when you find one specimen the spell is broken and you find twenty. By the end of April all the margins of the great poem of the woods are illuminated with these exquisite vignettes.
Most of the early flowers either come before the full unfolding of their leaves or else have inconspicuous ones. Yet Nature always provides for her bouquets the due proportion of green. The verdant and graceful sprays of the wild raspberry are unfolded very early, long before its time of flowering. Over the meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas of the equisetum, (horsetail or scouring-rush,) and the rich coarse vegetation of the veratrum, or American hellebore. In moist copses the ferns and osmundas begin to uncurl in April, opening their soft coils of spongy verdure, coated with woolly down, from which the humming-bird steals the lining of her nest.
The early blossoms represent the aboriginal epoch of our history: the blood-root and the May-flower are older than the white man, older perchance than the red man; they alone are the true Native Americans. Of the later wild plants, many of the most common are foreign importations. In our sycophancy we attach grandeur to the name _exotic_: we call aristocratic garden-flowers by that epithet; yet they are no more exotic than the humbler companions they brought with them, which have become naturalized. The dandelion, the buttercup, duckweed, celandine, mullein, burdock, yarrow, whiteweed, nightshade, and most of the thistles,--these are importations. Miles Standish never crushed these with his heavy heel as he strode forth to give battle to the savages; they never kissed the daintier foot of Priscilla, the Puritan maiden. It is noticeable that these are all of rather coarser texture than our indigenous flowers; the children instinctively recognize this, and are apt to omit them, when gathering the more delicate native blossoms of the woods.
There is something touching in the gradual retirement before civilization of these delicate aborigines. They do not wait for the actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs. Too well we know it,--we who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian, the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia,--we who remember the last secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow violet and the Viola debilis in Watertown, of the Convallaria trifolia near Fresh Pond, of the Hottonia beyond Wellington's Hill, of the Cornus florida in West Roxbury, of the Clintonia and the dwarf ginseng in Brookline,--we who have found in its one chosen nook the sacred Andromeda polyfolia of Linnaeus. Now vanished almost or wholly from city-suburbs, these fragile creatures still linger in more rural parts of Massachusetts; but they are doomed everywhere, unconsciously, yet irresistibly; while others still more shy, as the _Linnoea_, the yellow _Cypripedium_, the early pink _Azalea_, and the delicate white Corydalis or "Dutchman's breeches," are being chased into the very recesses of the Green and the White Mountains. The relics of the Indian tribes are supported by the legislature at Martha's Vineyard, while these precursors of the Indian are dying unfriended away.
And with these receding plants go also the special insects which haunt them. Who that knew that pure enthusiast, Dr. Harris, but remembers the accustomed lamentations of the entomologist over the departure of these winged companions of his lifetime? Not the benevolent Mr. John Beeson more tenderly mourns the decay of the Indians than he the exodus of these more delicate native tribes. In a letter which I happened to receive from him a short time previous to his death, he thus renewed the lament:--"I mourn for the loss of many of the beautiful plants and insects that were once found in this vicinity. _Clethra, Rhodora, Sanguinaria, Viola debilis, Viola acuta, Dracoena borealis, Rhexia, Cypripedium, Corallorhiza verna, Orchis spectabilis_, with others of less note, have been rooted out by the so-called hand of improvement. _Cicindela rugifrons, Helluo proeusta, Sphoeroderus stenostomus, Blethisa quadricollis, (Americana m?,) Carabus, Horia_, (which for several years occurred in profusion on the sands beyond Mount Auburn,) with others, have entirely disappeared from their former haunts, driven away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein. There may still remain in your vicinity some sequestered spots, congenial to these and other rarities, which may reward the botanist and the entomologist who will search them carefully. Perhaps you may find there the pretty coccinella-shaped, silver-margined _Omophron_, or the still rarer _Panagoeus fasciatus_,