far above one’s head their slender cups of honey, seem scarcely to belong to our sober zone, any more than the scarlet tanager which sometimes builds its nest beside them.  They appear bright exotics, which have wandered into our woods, and seem too happy to feel any wish for exit.  And just as they fade, their humbler sister in white begins to bloom, and carries on through the summer the same intoxicating fragrance.

But when June is at its height, the sculptured chalices of the Mountain Laurel begin to unfold, and thenceforward, for more than a month, extends the reign of this our woodland queen.  I know not why one should sigh after the blossoming gorges of the Himalaya, when our forests are all so crowded with this glowing magnificence,—­rounding the tangled swamps into smoothness, lighting up the underwoods, overtopping the pastures, lining the rural lanes, and rearing its great pinkish masses till they meet overhead.  The color ranges from the purest white to a perfect rose-pink, and there is an inexhaustible vegetable vigor about the whole thing, which puts to shame those tenderer shrubs that shrink before the progress of cultivation.  There is the Rhododendron, for instance, a plant of the same natural family with the Laurel and the Azalea, and looking more robust and woody than either:  it once grew in many localities in this region, and still lingers in a few, without consenting either to die or to blossom, and there is only one remote place from which any one now brings into our streets those large luxuriant flowers, waving white above the dark green leaves, and bearing “just a dream of sunset on their edges, and just a breath from the green sea in their hearts.”  But the Laurel, on the other hand, maintains its ground, imperturbable and almost impassable, on every hill-side, takes no hints, suspects no danger, and nothing but the most unmistakable onset from spade or axe can diminish its profusion.  Gathering it on the most lavish scale seems only to serve as wholesome pruning; nor can I conceive that the Indians, who once ruled over this whole county from Wigwam Hill, could ever have found it more inconveniently abundant than now.  We have perhaps no single spot where it grows in such perfect picturesqueness as at “The Laurels,” on the Merrimack, just above Newburyport,—­a whole hill-side scooped out and the hollow piled solidly with flowers, the pines curving around it above, and the river encircling it below, on which your boat glides along, and you look up through glimmering arcades of bloom.  But for the last half of June it monopolizes everything in the Worcester woods,—­no one picks anything else; and it fades so slowly that I have found a perfect blossom on the last day of July.