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