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The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. These two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year.
What the tendrils are really adapted for, appears to be such objects as the thin culms of certain grasses, or the long flexible bristles of a brush, or thin rigid leaves such as those of the Asparagus, all of which they seize in an admirable manner.
The pencil of the painter could scarcely exaggerate its vivid colouring. My window faces westward, and the great river rolls its yellow flood before my face, its ripples glittering like gold. On its farther shore I can see cultivated fields, where wave the tall graceful culms of the sugar-cane, easily distinguished from the tobacco-plant, of darker hue.
The canoe was headed for the bulrushes near the point where the trumpeter had been last seen; and a few strokes of the paddles brought the little craft with a whizzing sound among the sedge. But the culms of the rushes were so tall, and grew so closely together, that the canoemen, after entering, found to their chagrin they could not see six feet around them.
To see the great in the little, or the whole of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the culms of thought in my mind?" a remark which Channing quotes as very significant is not to be poetical.
The buffalo grass is a short grass, not more than a few inches in height, with crooked and pointed culms, often throwing out suckers that root again, and produce other leaves and culms, and in this way form a tolerably thick sward. When in flower or seed, it is headed by numerous spikes of half an inch in length, and on these the spikelets are regular and two rowed.
But although there was a species of cane growing in the valley that known to the hill people as the "ringall" its culms were neither of sufficient length nor thickness for their purpose.
Perhaps I have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
Their culms curved over, till the long quivering leaves dipped into the water. Here and there were thickets of them extending back into the plain. Only by passing through these could the bank of the river be reached. We entered among the willows, Wingrove going in the advance. I saw him stoop suddenly, as if to examine the ground.
My parachute having landed me gently on my feet, I sank naturally to my knees, and then, impelled by some other force than gravity, my body fell fully forward in complete relaxation until my face was buried in the thickly growing culms and my arms stretched out to embrace as much of the lush surface as they could encompass.
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