equate dimensions, such as the glass palm-house at
Kew, crowded side by side, with their crowned heads, and lofty stature,
and proud, erect bearing, we are involuntarily reminded of the monarchs
of many kingdoms met in august conclave.

"Lo! higher still the stately palm-trees rise,
Chequering the clouds with their unbending stems,
And o'er the clouds, amid the dark-blue skies,
Lifting their rich unfading diadems.
How calm and placidly they rest
Upon the heaven's indulgent breast,
As if their branches never breeze had known!
Light bathes them aye in glancing showers,
And Silence, 'mid their lofty bowers,
Sits on her moveless throne."

Are the Grasses worthy of mention for their beauty? Surely, yes. Many of
them display a downy lightness exquisitely lovely, as the common
Feather-grass. The golden panicles of the great Quake-grass, so
curiously compacted and hanging in stalks of so hair-like a tenuity as
to nod and tremble with the slightest motion, how beautiful are these!
And the satiny plumes of the Pampas-grass projecting from the clump of
leaves form a fine object. But the Bamboos, those great arborescent
Grasses of the tropics, form a characteristic feature of the vegetation
of those regions, of almost unexampled magnificence. I have seen them in
their glory, and can sympathise with the philosophical Humboldt in the
powerful effect which the grandeur of the Bamboo produces on the poetic
mind. It is an object never to be forgotten, especially when growing in
those isolated clumps, that look like tufts of ostrich-plumes magnified
to colossal dimensions. A thousand of these noble reeds standing in
close array, each four or five inches in the diameter of its stem, and
rising in erect dignity to the height of forty feet, and all waving
their tufted summits in diverging curves moved by every breeze,--form,
indeed, a magnificent spectacle. Growing in the most rocky situations,
the Bamboo is frequently planted in Jamaica on the very apex of those
conical hills which form so remarkable a feature in the landscape of the
interior, and to which its noble tufts constitute a most becoming crown.

Mr Ellis thus describes the elegance of these magnificent Grasses in
Madagascar:--

"The base of the hills and the valleys were covered with the Bamboo,
which was far more abundant than during any former part of the journey.
There were at least four dis