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.
--Had you Gyges' ring,
_Or the herb that gives invisibility_.
Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:
I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
_No fern-seed in my pocket_.
Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (_Asplenium
trichomanes_) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil
influences in the Cave of Spleen.
Safe passed the gnome through this fantastic band
A branch of healing spleen-wort in his hand.
The fern forms a splendid ornament for shadowy nooks and grottoes, or
fragments of ruins, or heaps of stones, or the odd corners of a large
garden or pleasure-ground.
I have had many delightful associations with this plant both at home and
abroad. When I visited the beautiful Island of Penang, Sir William
Norris, then the Recorder of the Island, and who was a most
indefatigable collector of ferns, obligingly presented me with a
specimen of every variety that he had discovered in the hills and
vallies of that small paradise; and I suppose that in no part of the
world could a finer collection of specimens of the fern be made for a
botanist's _herbarium_. Fern leaves will look almost as well ten years
after they are gathered as on the day on which they are transferred from
the dewy hillside to the dry pages of a book.
Jersey and Penang are the two loveliest islands on a small scale that I
have yet seen: the latter is the most romantic of the two and has nobler
trees and a richer soil and a brighter sky--but they are both charming
retreats for the lovers of peace and nature. As I have devoted some
verses to Jersey I must have some also on