As for the poetry I promised--well, I have been quoting it, have I not? But
there is more, and better. Surely it was a romantic folk that kept in its
store-rooms the "best Blew raisins of the sun," or "plumpsome raisins of
the sun," and made its mead with dew, and eagerly exchanged with each other
recipes for "Conserve of Red Roses." And now we come to an essential
feature of the whole. It is a _cuisine_ that does not reek of shops and
co-operative stores, but of the wood, the garden, the field and meadow.
Like Culpeper's pharmacopeia, it is made for the most part of "Such Things
only as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies." Is it any
wonder that the metheglin should be called the "Liquor of Life," which has
these among its ingredients: Bugloss, borage, hyssop, organ,
sweet-marjoram, rosemary, French cowslip, coltsfoot, thyme, burnet,
self-heal, sanicle, betony, blew-button, harts-tongue, meadowsweet,
liverwort, bistort, St. John's wort, yellow saunders, balm, bugle,
agrimony, tormentilla, comfrey, fennel, clown's allheal, maidenhair,
wall-rue, spleen-wort, sweet oak, Paul's betony, and mouse-ear?

The housewife of to-day buys unrecognisable dried herbs in packets or
bottles. In those days she gathered them in their season out of doors. The
companions to _The Closet Opened_ should be the hasty and entertaining
Culpeper, the genial Gerard, and Coles of the delightful _Adam in Eden_,
all the old herbals that were on Digby's bookshelves, so full of
absurdities, so full of pretty wisdom. They will tell you how to mix in
your liquor eglantine for coolness, borage, rosemary, and sweet-marjoram
for vigour, and by which planet each herb or flower is governed. Has our
sentiment for the flowers of the field increased now we no longer drink
their essence, or use them in our dishes? I doubt it. It is surely a
pardonable grossness that we should desire the sweet fresh things to become
part of us--like children, who do indeed love flowers, and eat them. In the