--Yon swelling downs where the sweet air stirs
The harebells, and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold.
_Keat's Endymion_.
Fair maidens, I'll sing you a song,
I'll tell of the bonny wild flower,
Whose blossoms so yellow, and branches so long,
O'er moor and o'er rough rocky mountains are flung
Far away from trim garden and bower
_L.A. Tuamley_.
The PRICKLY GORSE or Goss or Furze, (_ulex_)[089] I cannot omit to
notice, because it was the plant which of all others most struck
Dillenius when he first trod on English ground. He threw himself on his
knees and thanked Heaven that he had lived to see the golden undulation
of acres of wind-waved gorse. Linnaeus lamented that he could scarcely
keep it alive in Sweden even in a greenhouse.
I have the most delightful associations connected with this plant, and
never think of it without a summer feeling and a crowd of delightful
images and remembrances of rural quietude and blue skies and balmy
breezes. Cowper hardly does it justice:
The common, over-grown with fern, and rough
With prickly gorse, that shapeless and deformed
And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom
And decks itself with ornaments of gold,
Yields no unpleasing ramble.
The plant is indeed irregularly shaped, but it is not _deformed_, and if
it is dangerous to the touch, so also is the rose, unless it be of that
species which Milton places in Paradise--"_and without thorns the
rose_."
Hurdis is more complimentary and more just to the richest ornament of
the swelling hill and the level moor.
And what more noble than the vernal furze
With golden caskets hung?
I have seen whole _cotees_ or _coteaux_ (sides of hills) in the sweet
little island of Jersey thickly mantled with the golden radiance of this
beautiful wildflower. The whole Vallee des Vaux (_the valley of
vallies_) is sometimes alive with its lustre.