Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PURPLE SANDWORT. Among the loose and arid sands, The humble Arenaria creeps; Slowly the purple star expands, But soon within its calyx sleeps. And those small hells so lightly ray’d With young Aurora’s rosy hue, Are to the noontide sun display’d, But close their folds against the dew. Smith. Arenaria rubra. Purple Sandwort. From the arid, sandy places, in which the Arenaria grows. Opening Closing In fine weather, When the sun declines Early. From 4 to 6. PURPLE SANDWORT. jHE lark and the purple sandwort are inseparably connected in the herdsman’s calendar. When the modest little flower opens her petals in the sunny morning, the lark springs from his nest in the wild heath, and pours forth his full tide of song, to meet the rising sun. She, too, seems to look after him, as if she rejoiced in the opening day, though she has no voice with which to join the universal chorus that bursts forth from every creature in wood or field. Abroad at such an hour in the stillness and the loveliness of the early dawn, when not even the wakeful labourer is moving, when no curling smoke ascends from the cottage chimney, nor are there any sounds of busy life to break uponthe quiet of the scene, how solemn, how exhilarating are the feelings of the mind! All then is still, as regards the busy, bustling concerns of men. But the hum of insects is abroad, early birds start forth from their coverts in woods and hedges, the gush of the rill, which, although it never ceases, is scarcely audible at a later hour, is now heard, as it goes sounding on its pebbly bed, bordered with ferns and flowers, while the night breeze is still lingering among the bushes with a pleasant rustle. Sandworts, whether stationed as the one which Linnaeus added to the horologe of Flora, o…