The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 11, September, 1858

 
  "Since my king and patron have thought fit
  To place me on the throne of modern wit,—"
 

he proceeds to read the subject throng a saucy lecture on their vices and follies,—

"As bishops to their clergy give their charge."

A good-natured dogmatism is the tone of the whole; but presumption and dogmatism find no charity among the genus irritabile, and Whitehead received no quarter. Small wits and great levelled their strokes at a hide which self-conceit had happily rendered proof. The sturdiest assailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,—

 
    "Who in the Laureate chair—
  By grace, not merit, planted there—
  In awkward pomp is seen to sit,
  And by his patent proves his wit;
  For favors of the great, we know,
  Can wit as well as rank bestow;
  And they who, without one pretension,
  Can get for fools a place or pension,
  Must able be supposed, of course,
  If reason is allowed due force,
  To give such qualities and grace
  As may equip them for the place.
 
 
    "But he who measures as he goes
  A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,
  And is too frugal to dispense
  At once both poetry and sense,—
  Who, from amidst his slumbering guards,
  Deals out a charge to subject bards,
  Where couplets after couplets creep,
  Propitious to the reign of sleep," etc.
 

Again, in the "Prophecy of Famine,"—

 
  "A form, by silken smile, and tone
  Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known,
  Folly's chief friend, Decorum's eldest son,
  In every party found, and yet of none,
  This airy substance, this substantial shade."
 

And elsewhere he begs for

 
        "Some such draught…
  As makes a Whitehead's ode go down,
  Or slakes the feverette of Brown."
 

But satire disturbed not the calm equanimity of the pensioner and placeman.

 
         "The laurel worn
  By poets in old time, but destined now
  In grief to wither on a Whitehead's brow,"
 

continued to fade there, until a whole generation of poets had passed away. It was not until the middle of April, 1785, that Death made way for a successor.

The suddenness of Whitehead's decease came near leaving a royal birthday unsung,—an omission scarcely pardonable with one of George the Third's methodical habits. An impromptu appointment had to be made. It was made before the Laureate was buried. Thomas Warton, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, received the patent on the 30th of April, and his ode, married to fitting music, was duly forthcoming on the 24th of May. The selection of Warton was faultless. His lyrical verse was the best of a vicious school; his sonnets, according to that exquisite sonneteer, Sir Egerton Brydges, were the finest in the language; his "History of English Poetry," of which three volumes had appeared, displayed an intimate acquaintance with the early English writers. Nor should we pass unnoticed his criticisms and annotations upon Milton and Spenser, manifesting as they did the acutest sensitiveness to the finest beauties of poetry. If the laurel implied the premiership of living poets, Warton certainly deserved it. He was a head and shoulders taller than his actual contemporaries.¹⁷ He stood in the gap between the old school and the new, between the dead and the coming. Goldsmith and Johnson were no more; Cowper did not print his "Task" until the autumn of 1785; Burns made his début about the same moment; Rogers published his "Ode to Superstition" the next year; the famous "Fourteen Sonnets" of Bowles came two years later; while Wordsworth and Landor made their first appearance in 1793. Fortunate thus in time, Warton was equally fortunate in politics. He was an Oxford Tory, a firm believer in divine right and passive obedience, and a warm supporter of the new ministers. To the King, it may be added, no nomination could have given greater satisfaction. The official odes of Warton evince all the elegant traits which characterize his other writings. Their refined taste and exquisite modulation are admirable; while the matter is far less sycophantic than was to be expected from so devout a monarchist. The tender of the laurel certainly gratified him:—

 
  "Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure
  Nor useless all my vacant days have flowed,
  From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature,
  Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestowed."¹⁸
 

And, like Southey, he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary proportion of poetical panegyric.

 
  "Affection and applause alike he shared;
  All loved the man, all venerate the bard:
  E'en Prejudice his fate afflicted hears,
  And lettered Envy sheds reluctant tears.
  Such worth the laurel could alone repay,
  Profaned by Cibber, and contemned by Gray;
  Yet hence its Breath shall new distinction claim,
  And, though it gave not, take from Warton fame."¹⁹
 

The last of Warton's odes was written in his last illness, and performed three days after his death. Appositely enough, it was an invocation to Health, meriting more than ordinary praise for eloquent fervor. Warton died May 21st, 1790. The laurel was vacant for a month, when Henry James Pye was gazetted. There was hardly a hungry placeman in London who had not as just pretensions to the honor. What poetical gifts he had displayed had been in school or college exercises. His real claims consisted in having spent a fortune in electioneering for ministers; and these claims being pressed with unusual urgency at the moment of Warton's death, he was offered the Laureateship as satisfaction in part.²⁰ He eagerly accepted it, and received the balance two years later in the shape of a commission as Police Magistrate of Middlesex. Thereafter, like Henry Fielding, or Gilbert A'Beckett, he divided his days between penal law and polite literature. His version of the "Poetics" of Aristotle, with illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,—the subject, King Alfred,—the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,—not, however, before an American publisher was found daring enough to reprint it. There are also to be mentioned translations from Pindar, Horace, and other classics, for Sharpe's edition of the British Poets, a collection to which he lent editorial aid. "Poet Pye"²¹ was fortunate in escaping contemporary wit and satire. Gifford alluded to him, but Gifford's Toryism was security that no Tory Court-Poet would be roughly handled. Byron passed him in silence. The Smiths treated him as respectfully as they treated anybody. Moore's wit at the expense of the Regent and his courtiers had only found vent in the "Two-Penny Post-Bag" when Pye was gathered to his predecessors.

That calamity occurred in August, 1813. With it ended the era of birthday songs and New-Year's verses. The King was mad; his nativity was therefore hardly a rational topic of rejoicing. The Prince Regent had no taste for the solemn inanity of stipulated ode, the performance of which only served to render insufferably tedious the services of the two occasions in the year when imperative custom demanded his attendance at the Chapel. Consultation was had with John Wilson Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty. Croker's sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended Southey. He had already recommended Southey to the "Quarterly," and through the "Quarterly" to Croker, then and still its most brilliant contributor; and this second instance of disinterested kindness was equally efficacious. Southey was appointed. The tierce of Canary ceased to be a perquisite of the office, the Laureate disclaiming it; and instead of annual odes upon set occasions, such effusions as the poet might choose to offer at the suggestion of passing events were to be accepted as the sum of official duty. These were to be said or read, not sung,—a change that completed the radical revolution of the office.

However important the salary of a hundred pounds may have been to Southey, it is very sure that the laurel seemed to infuse all its noxious and poisonous juices into his literary character. His vanity, like Whitehead's, led him to regard his chaplet as the reward of unrivalled merit. His study-chair was glorified, and became a throne. His supremacy in poetry was as indubitable as the king's supremacy in matters ecclesiastical. He felt himself constrained to eliminate utterly from his conscience whatever traces of early republicanism, pantisocracy, and heresy still disfigured it; and to conform unreservedly to the exactest requirements of high Toryism in politics and high Churchism in religion. He was in the pay and formed a part of the government; could he do else than toil mightily in his department for the service of a master who had so sagaciously anticipated the verdict of posterity, as to declare him, who was the least popular, the greatest of living poets? He found it a duty to assume a rigid censorship over as many of his Majesty's lieges as were addicted to verse,—to enact the functions of minister of literary police,—to reprehend the levity of Moore, the impiety of Byron, the democracy of Leigh Hunt, the unhappy lapse of Hazlitt, the drunkenness of Lamb. Assumptions so open to ridicule, and so disparaging to far abler men, told as disadvantageously upon his fame as upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as envy of his sublime elevation:—

 
  "Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
  In honor it was given; with honor it is worn."
 

Of course such matchless self-complacency defied assault.

Southey's congratulatory odes appeared as often as public occasion seemed to demand them. There were in rapid succession the "Ode to the Regent," the "Carmen Triumphale," the "Pilgrimage to Waterloo," the "Vision of Judgment," the "Carmen Nuptiale," the "Ode on the Death of the Princess Charlotte." The "Quarterly" exalted them, one and all; the "Edinburgh" poured upon them volleys of keen but ineffectual ridicule. At last the Laureate desisted. The odes no longer appeared; and during the long and dark closing years of his life, the only production of the Laureate pen was the yearly signature to a receipt for one hundred pounds sterling, official salary.

Robert Southey died in March, 1843. Sir Robert Peel, who had obliged Wordsworth the year before, by transferring the post in the excise, which he had so long held, to the poet's son, and substituting a pension for its salary, testified further his respect for the Bard of Rydal by tendering him the laurel. It was not to be refused. Had the office been hampered with any demands upon the occupant for popular lyric, in celebration of notable events, Wordsworth was certainly the last man to place in it. His frigid nature was incapable of that prompt enthusiasm, without which, poetry, especially poetry responsive to some strong emotion momentarily agitating the popular heart, is lifeless and worthless. Fortunately, there were no such exactions. The office had risen from its once low estate to be a dignified sinecure. As such, Wordsworth filled it; and, dying, left it without one poetical evidence of having worn the wreath.

To him, in May, 1850, succeeded, who, as the most acceptable poet of the day, could alone rightly succeed, Alfred Tennyson, the actual Poet-Laureate. Not without opposition. There were those who endeavored to extinguish the office, and hang up the laurel forever,—and to that end brought pregnant argument to bear upon government. "The Times" was more than usually decided in favor of the policy of extinguishment. Give the salary, it was urged, as a pension to some deserving writer of verse, whose necessities are exacting; but abolish a title degraded by association with names and uses so unworthy, as to confer shame, not honor, on the wearer. The laurel is presumed to be granted to the ablest living English poet. What vocation have the Tite Barnacles, red-tapists, vote-mongers, of Downing Street to discriminate and determine this supreme poetical excellence, in regard to which the nicest critics, or the most refined and appreciative reading public may reasonably differ among themselves as widely as the stars? On the other hand, it was argued, that the laurel had, from its last two wearers, recovered its lost dignity. They had lent it honor, which it could not fail to confer upon any survivor, however great his name. If, then, the old odium had disappeared, why not retain the place for the sake of the ancient worthies whom tradition had handed down as at one time or another connected with it? There was rarely difficulty in selecting from among contemporary poets one of preëminent talent, whose elevation to the laurel would offend none of his fellows. There was certainly no difficulty in the present case. There was palpable evidence that Tennyson was by all admission the hierophant of his order; and it would be time enough to dispense with the title when a future occasion should be at a loss to decide among contending candidates. The latter reasoning prevailed. Tennyson accepted the laurel, and with it a self-imposed obligation to make occasional acknowledgments for the gift.

The first opportunity presented itself in the issue of a fresh edition of his poems, in 1851. To these he prefixed some noble verses, dedicating the volumes to the Queen, and referring with as much delicacy as modesty to his place and his predecessor:—

 
  "Victoria,—since your royal grace
  To one of less desert allows
  This laurel, greener from the brows
  Of him that uttered nothing base."—
 

The next occasion was of a different order. The hero of Waterloo ended his long life in 1852, and a nation was in mourning. Then, if ever, poets, whether laurelled or leafless, were called to give eloquent utterance to the popular grief; and Tennyson, of all the poets, was looked to for its highest expression. The Threnode of the Laureate was duly forthcoming. The public was, as it had no right to be, disappointed. Tennyson's Muse was ever a wild and wilful creature, defiant of rules, and daringly insubordinate to arbitrary forms. It could not, with the witling in the play, cap verses with any man. The moment its tasks were dictated and the form prescribed, that moment there was ground to expect the self-willed jade to play a jade's trick, and leave us with no decent results of inspiration. For odes and sonnets, and other such Procrustean moulds into which poetic thought is at times cast, Tennyson had neither gift nor liking. When, therefore, with the Duke's death, came a sudden demand upon his Muse, and that in shape so solemn as to forbid, as the poet conceived, any fanciful license of invention, the Pindaric form seemed inevitable; and that form rendered a fair exhibition of the poet's peculiar genius out of the question. Strapped up in prescription, and impelled to move by official impulse, his Pegasus was as awkward as a cart-horse. And yet men did him the justice to say that his failure out-topped the success of others.

Far better—indeed, with the animating thrill of the war-trumpet—was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and simply because the topic admitted of whatever novelty of treatment the bias of the bard might devise. This is the Laureate's most successful attempt at strictly popular composition. It proves him to possess the stuff of a Tyrtaeus or a Körner,—something vastly more stirring and stimulating than the usual staple of

"The dry-tongued laurel's pattering talk."²²

Howbeit, late may he have call for another war-song!

With the name of Tennyson we reach the term of our Laureate calendar. Long ages and much perilously dry research must he traverse who shall enlarge these outlines to the worthier proportions of history. Yet will the labor not be wholly barren. It will bring him in contact with all the famous of letters and poetry; he will fight over again numberless quarrels of authors; he will soar in boundless Pindaric flights, or sink, sooth to say, in unfathomed deeps of bathos. With one moral he will be profoundly impressed: Of all the more splendid results of genius which adorn our language and literature,—for the literature of the English language is ours,—not one owes its existence to the laurel; not one can be directly or indirectly traced to royal encouragement, or the stimulus of salary or stipend. The laurel, though ever green, and throwing out blossoms now and then of notable promise, has borne no fruit. We might strike from the language all that is ascribable solely to the honor and emolument of this office, without inflicting a serious loss upon letters. The masques of Jonson would be regretted; a few lines of Tennyson would be missed. For the rest, we might readily console ourselves. It may certainly be urged, that the laurel was designed rather as a reward than as a provocative of merit; but the allegation has become true only within the last half-century. Antecedently to Southey, it was the consideration for which return in poetry was demanded,—in the first instance, a return in dramatic poetry, and then in the formal lyric. It was put forth as the stimulus to works good in their several kinds, and it may be justly complained of for never having provoked any good works. To represent it as a reward commensurate with the merits of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even of Southey, is to rate three first-class names in modern poetry on a level with the names of those third-rate "poetillos" who, during the eighteenth century, obtained the same reward for two intolerable effusions yearly. Upon the whole, therefore, we incline to the opinion that the laurel can no longer confer honor or profit upon literature. Sack is palatable, and a hundred pounds are eminently useful; but the arbitrary judgments of queens and courtiers upon poetical issues are neither useful nor palatable. The world may, in fact, contrive to content itself, should King Alfred prove the last of the Laureates.

WATER-LILIES

The inconstant April mornings drop showers or sunbeams over the glistening lake, while far beneath its surface a murky mass disengages itself from the muddy bottom, and rises slowly through the waves. The tasselled alder-branches droop above it; the last year's blackbird's nest swings over it in the grapevine; the newly-opened Hepaticas and Epigaeas on the neighboring bank peer down modestly to look for it; the water-skater (Gerris) pauses on the surface near it, casting on the shallow bottom the odd shadow of his feet, like three pairs of boxing-gloves; the Notonecta, or water-boatman, rows round and round it, sometimes on his breast, sometimes on his back; queer caddis-worms trail their self-made homesteads of leaves or twigs beside it; the Dytiscus, dorbug of the water, blunders clumsily against it; the tadpole wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon it, meditating of future frogdom; the passing wild-duck dives and nibbles at it; the mink and musk-rat brush it with their soft fur; the spotted turtle slides over it; the slow larvae of gauzy dragon-flies cling sleepily to its sides and await their change: all these fair or uncouth creatures feel, through the dim waves, the blessed longing of spring; and yet not one of them dreams that within that murky mass there lies a treasure too white and beautiful to be yet intrusted to the waves, and that for many a day that bud must yearn toward the surface, before, aspiring above it, as mortals to heaven, it meets the sunshine with the answering beauty of the Water-Lily.

Days and weeks have passed away; the wild-duck has flown onward, to dive for his luncheon in some remoter lake; the tadpoles have made themselves legs, with which they have vanished; the caddis-worms have sealed themselves up in their cylinders, and emerged again as winged insects; the dragon-flies have crawled up the water-reeds, and, clinging with heads upward, (not downward, as strangely described in a late "North British Review,") have undergone the change which symbolizes immortality; the world is transformed from spring to summer; the lily-buds are opened into glossy leaf and radiant flower, and we have come for the harvest.

We lodged, last night, in the old English phrase, "at the sign of the Oak and Star." Wishing, not, indeed, like the ancient magicians, to gather magic berry and bud before sunrise, but at least to see these treasures of the lake in their morning hour, we camped last night on a little island, which one tall tree almost covers with its branches, while a dense undergrowth of young chestnuts and birches fills all the intervening space, touching the water all around the circular, shelving shore. Yesterday was hot, but the night was cool, and we kindled a gypsy fire of twigs, less for warmth than for society. The first gleam made the dark lonely islet into a cheering home, turned the protecting tree to a starlit roof, and the chestnut-sprays to illuminated walls. Lying beneath their shelter, every fresh flickering of the fire kindled the leaves into brightness and banished into dark interstices the lake and sky; then the fire died into embers, the leaves faded into solid darkness in their turn, and water and heavens showed light and close and near, until fresh twigs caught fire and the blaze came up again. Rising to look forth, at intervals, during the night,—for it is the worst feature of a night out-doors, that sleeping seems such a waste of time,—we watched the hilly and wooded shores of the lake sink into gloom and glimmer into dawn again, amid the low plash of waters and the noises of the night.

Precisely at half-past three, a song-sparrow above our heads gave one liquid trill, so inexpressibly sudden and delicious, that it seemed to set to music every atom of freshness and fragrance that Nature held; then the spell was broken, and the whole shore and lake were vocal with song. Joining in this jubilee of morning, we were early in motion; bathing and breakfast, though they seemed indisputably in accordance with the instincts of the Universe, yet did not detain us long, and we were promptly on our way to Lily Pond. Will the reader join us?

It is one of those summer days when a veil of mist gradually burns away before the intense sunshine, and the sultry morning only plays at coolness, and that with its earliest visitors alone. But we are before the sunlight, though not before the sunrise, and can watch the pretty game of alternating mist and shine. Stray gleams of glory lend their trailing magnificence to the tops of chestnut-trees, floating vapors raise the outlines of the hills and make mystery of the wooded islands, and, as we glide through the placid water, we can sing, with the Chorus in the "Ion" of Euripides, "O immense and brilliant air, resound with our cries of joy!"

Almost every town has its Lily Pond, dear to boys and maidens, and partially equalizing, by its annual delights, the presence or absence of other geographical advantages. Ours is accessible from the larger lake only by taking the skiff over a narrow embankment, which protects our fairyland by its presence, and eight distant factories by its dam. Once beyond it, we are in a realm of dark Lethean water, utterly unlike the sunny depths of the main lake. Hither the water-lilies have retreated, to a domain of their own. Darker than these dark waves, there stand in their bosom hundreds of submerged trees, and dismasted roots still upright, spreading their vast, uncouth limbs like enormous spiders beneath the surface. They are remnants of border wars with the axe, vegetable Witheringtons, still fighting on their stumps, but gradually sinking into the soft ooze, and ready, perhaps, when a score of centuries has piled two more strata of similar remains in mud above them, to furnish foundations for a newer New Orleans; that city having been lately discovered to be thus supported.

The present decline in business is clear revenue to the water-lilies, and these waters are higher than usual because the idle factories do not draw them off. But we may notice, in observing the shores, that peculiar charm of water, that, whether its quantity be greater or less, its grace is the same; it makes its own boundary in lake or river, and where its edge is, there seems the natural and permanent margin. And the same natural fitness, without reference to mere quantity, extends to its children. Before us lie islands and continents of lilies, acres of charms, whole, vast, unbroken surfaces of stainless whiteness. And yet, as we approach them, every islanded cup that floats in lonely dignity, apart from the multitude, appears as perfect in itself, couched in white expanded perfection, its reflection taking a faint glory of pink that is scarcely perceptible in the flower. As we glide gently among them, the air grows fragrant, and a stray breeze flaps the leaves, as if to welcome us. Each floating flower becomes suddenly a ship at anchor, or rather seems beating up against the summer wind, in a regatta of blossoms.

Early as it is, the greater part of the flowers are already expanded. Indeed, that experience of Thoreau's, of watching them open in the first sunbeams, rank by rank, is not easily obtained, unless perhaps in a narrow stream, where the beautiful slumberers are more regularly marshalled. In our lake, at least, they open irregularly, though rapidly. But, this morning, many linger as buds, while others peer up, in half-expanded beauty, beneath the lifted leaves, frolicsome as Pucks or baby-nymphs. As you raise the leaf, in such cases, it is impossible not to imagine that a pair of tiny hands have upheld it, or else that the pretty head will dip down again, and disappear. Others, again, have expanded all but the inmost pair of white petals, and these spring apart at the first touch of the finger on the stem. Some spread vast vases of fragrance, six or seven inches in diameter, while others are small and delicate, with petals like fine lace-work. Smaller still, we sometimes pass a flotilla of infant leaves, an inch in diameter. All these grow from the deep, dark water,—and the blacker it is, the fairer their whiteness shows. But your eye follows the stem often vainly into those sombre depths, and vainly seeks to behold Sabrina fair, sitting with her twisted braids of lilies, beneath the glassy, cool, but not translucent wave. Do not start, when, in such an effort, only your own dreamy face looks back upon you, beyond the gunwale of the reflected boat, and you find that you float double, self and shadow.

Let us rest our paddles, and look round us, while the idle motion sways our light skiff onward, now half-embayed among the lily-pads, now lazily gliding over intervening gulfs. There is a great deal going on in these waters and their fringing woods and meadows. All the summer long, the pond is bordered with successive walls of flowers. In early spring emerge the yellow catkins of the swamp-willow, first; then the long tassels of the graceful alders expand and droop, till they weep their yellow dust upon the water; then come the birch-blossoms, more tardily; then the downy leaves and white clusters of the medlar or shadbush (Amelanchier Canadensis of Gray); these dropping, the roseate chalices of the mountain-laurel open; as they fade into melancholy brown, the sweet Azalea uncloses; and before its last honeyed blossom has trailed down, dying, from the stem, the more fragrant Clethra starts out above, the button-bush thrusts forth its merry face amid wild roses, and the Clematis waves its sprays of beauty. Mingled with these grow, lower, the spiraeas, white and pink, yellow touch-me-not, fresh white arrowhead, bright blue vervain and skullcap, dull snakehead, gay monkey-flower, coarse eupatoriums, milk-weeds, golden-rods, asters, thistles, and a host beside. Beneath, the brilliant scarlet cardinal-flower begins to palisade the moist shores; and after its superb reflection has passed away from the waters, the grotesque witch-hazel flares out its narrow yellow petals amidst the October leaves, and so ends the floral year. There is not a week during all these months, when one cannot stand in the boat and wreathe garlands of blossoms from the shores.

These all crowd around the brink, and watch, day and night, the opening and closing of the water-lilies. Meanwhile, upon the waters, our queen keeps her chosen court, nor can one of these mere land-loving blossoms touch the hem of her garment. In truth, she bears no sister near her throne. There is but this one species among us, Nymphaea odorata. The beautiful little rose-colored Nymphaea sanguinea, which once adorned the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, was merely an occasional variety of costume. She has, indeed, an English half-sister, Nymphaea alba, less beautiful, less fragrant, but keeping more fashionable hours,—not opening (according to Linnaeus) till seven, nor closing till four. Her humble cousin, the yellow Nuphar, keeps commonly aloof, as becomes a poor relation, though created from the selfsame mud,—a fact which Hawthorne has beautifully moralized. The prouder Nelumbium, a second-cousin, lineal descendant of the sacred bean of Pythagoras, keeps aloof, through pride, not humility, and dwells, like a sturdy democrat, in the Far West.