This narrow strip of meadow that winds along the bottom of the gorge is not the single tinted green ribbon it lately was.  The light of its verdure has been dimmed by the light of flowers.  The grass mounts high, but not higher than the oxeye daisies, the blue racemes of stachys, the mauve-coloured heads of scabious, the bladder-campions, the yellow buttercups and goat’s-beard.  The oxeyes are so numberless in one long reach of meadow that a white drapery, which every breeze folds or unfolds, seems to have been cast as light as sea-foam upon the illimitable forest of stems.  The white butterflies that flutter above are like flecks of foam on the wing.  Elsewhere it is the blue of the stachys and the spiked veronica that rules.  Deeper in the herbage other races of flowers shine in the fair groves of this grassy paradise, and every blossom, however small, is a mystery, a miracle.  Here is the star of Bethlehem, wide open in the sunshine and showing so purely white amidst the green, and yonder is the purple fringe-like tuft of the weird muscari.  Along the banks of the stream tall lilac-purple, stock-like flowers rise proudly above the grasses.  They belong to the hesperis or dame’s violet, a common wild-flower in this valley.  Upon my left is the abrupt stony slope of the gorge.  Between it and the meadow are shrubs of yellow jessamine starred with blossom.  But the stony steep that dazzles the eyes with the sun’s reflected glare has its flowers too.  Nature, in her great passion for beauty, even draws it out of the disintegrated fragments of time-worn rock, whose banks would otherwise be as stark and dry as the desert sand.  Lightly as flakes of snow the frail blossoms of the white rock-rose lie upon the stones.  Then there are patches of candytuft running from white into pink, crimson flowers of the little crane’s-bill, and spurges whose floral leaves are now losing their golden green and taking a hue of fiery brown.

An open wood, chiefly of dwarf oak, and shrubs such as the wayfaring tree, the guelder-rose, and the fly-honeysuckle, now stretches along the opposite side of the gorge.  Here scattered groups of columbine send forth a glow of dark blue from the shadowy places; the lily of the valley and its graceful ever-bowing cousin, the Solomon’s seal, show their chaste and wax-like flowers amidst the cool green of their fresh leaves; and the monkey-orchis stands above the green moss and the creeping geraniums like a little rocket of pale purple fire just springing from the earth towards the lingering shreds of storm-cloud that are melting in the warm sky.

In a few weeks what will have become of all this greenness and beautiful colour of flowers?  The torrid sun and the hot breath of summer will have burnt up the fair garment of spring, and laid bare the arid sternness of the South again.  The nightingale still warbles fitfully in the green bushes, but the raven, perched up yonder upon the stark rock, croaks like a misanthrope at the quick passing away of youth and loveliness.  What sad undertones, mournful murmurs of the deep that receives the drifted leaves, mingle with the spring’s soft flutings and all the voices that proclaim the season of joy!