There alone have I loitered ’mid blossoms of gold,
    And forgot that the great world was crowded and cold,
    Nor believed that a land of enchantment could show
    A vale more divine than the Vallee des Vaux.

    A few scattered cots, like white clouds in the sky,
    Or like still sails at sea when the light breezes die,
    And a mill with its wheel in the brook’s silver glow,
    Form thy beautiful hamlet, sweet Vallee des Vaux!

    As the brook prattled by like an infant at play,
    And each wave as it passed stole a moment away,
    I thought how serenely a long life would flow,
    By the sweet little brook in the Vallee des Vaux.

D.L.R.

Jersey is not the only one of the Channel Islands that is enriched with “blossoms of gold.”  In the sister island of Guernsey the prickly gorse is much used for hedges, and Sir George Head remarks that the premises of a Guernsey farmer are thus as impregnably fortified and secured as if his grounds were surrounded by a stone wall.  In the Isle of Man the furze grows so high that it is sometimes more like a fir tree than the ordinary plant.

There is an old proverb:—­“When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion”—­that is never.  The gorse blooms all the year.

FERN.

    I’ll seek the shaggy fern-clad hill
    And watch, ’mid murmurs muttering stern,
    The seed departing from the fern
    Ere wakeful demons can convey
    The wonder-working charm away.

Leyden.

“The green and graceful Fern” (filices) with its exquisite tracery must not be overlooked.  It recalls many noble home-scenes to British eyes.  Pliny says that “of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear neither flowers nor seed.”  And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of Addison who ridicules “a Doctor that had arrived at the knowledge of the green and red dragon, and had discovered the female fern-seed.”  The seed is very minute and might easily escape a careless eye.  In the present day every one knows that the seed of the fern lies on the under side of the leaves, and a single leaf will often bear some millions of seeds.  Even those amongst the vulgar who believed the plant bore seed, had an idea that the seeds were visible only at certain mysterious seasons and to favored individuals who by carrying a quantity of it on their person, were able, like those who wore the helmet of Pluto or the ring of Gyges, to walk unseen amidst a crowd.  The seed was supposed to be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the Baptist was born.

    We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,

Shakespeare’s Henry IV.  Part I.

In Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s Fair Maid of the Inn, is the following allusion to the fern.