The old ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of a coconut.

But these are not cocos.

The last year's leaves of the coco are rich yellow, and its stem is curved.

These are groo-groos; {79c} they stand as fresh proofs that we are indeed in the Tropics, and as 'a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.' For it is a joy for ever, a sight never to be forgotten, to have once seen palms, breaking through and, as it were, defying the soft rounded forms of the broad-leaved vegetation by the stern grace of their simple lines; the immovable pillar-stem looking the more immovable beneath the toss and lash and flicker of the long leaves, as they awake out of their sunlit sleep, and rage impatiently for a while before the mountain gusts, and fall asleep again.

Like a Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room, sharp cut, cold, virginal; shaming, by the grandeur of mere form, the voluptuousness of mere colour, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm in the forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved.