There cleaving to the ground, it lies, With multitude of purple eyes, Spangling a cushion green like moss.
To this the poet added in a note: "This most beautiful plant is scarce in England. The first specimen I ever saw of it, in its native bed, was singularly fine, the tuft or cushion being at least eight inches in diameter. I have only met with it in two places among our mountains, in both of which I have since sought for it in vain." The other place may have been the hill above Rydal Mount; for a contributor to the _Flora of the Lake District_ states that it was there shown to him by Wordsworth. The poet's knowledge of the higher mountains, and of the mountain flora, was not great. The moss-campion though local, is much less rare than he supposed, and its "cushions" grow to a far larger bulk than that of the one described by him. In his _Holidays on High Lands_ (1869), Hugh Macmillan, paying tribute to the beauty of this flower, remarks that "a sheet of it last summer on one of the Westmorland mountains measured five feet across, and was one solid mass of colour." I have seen it approaching that size in Wales.
Another plant which I was anxious to see was the Alpine _cerastium_ (mouse-ear chickweed), said to grow "sparingly" on the crags of Striding Edge and in a few other places. I failed to find it; but when Mr. Nixon had pointed out to me, in a photograph of the Edge, a particular crag on which he had noticed the flower in a previous summer, I determined to renew the search. This the weather prevented; but in the following year, happening to be in Borrowdale in June, I walked from Keswick to the top of Helvellyn, and thence descended to Striding Edge, where, on the very rock indicated by Mr. Nixon, I found the object of my journey--not yet in flower, for I was somewhat ahead of its season, but authenticated as _cerastium alpinum_ by the small oval leaves covered with dense white down. I have several times seen, high up on Carnedd Llewelyn, a form of _cerastium_ with larger flowers than the common kind; this I think must have been what is called _c. alpestre_ in the _Flora of Carnarvonshire_; but the true _alpinum_, though frequent in the Scottish highlands, is decidedly rare in Wales.