I repressed, in the luxuriant struggle for | we who have gardens that we love, primacy. But somewhere or other willingly give of our superfluity. along it I come upon specimens of, I like to think I have helped to beautify think, all the annuals that were sown. many a garden that, before, hardly deGaillardia and Godetia are particularly served the epithet; and I am sure I conspicuous in front, and are run have received far more than I have pretty close by Clarkia. Marvel of given; from generous head gardeners, Peru, and mallows of various hue, from kindly rectors, from clergymen's flourish amazingly a little further back, wives with little plots of old-world even in the half-shade of permanent flowers, handed down from generashrubs. Sweet sultan is cheek-by-jowl tion to generation, and tended with with the Heliochrysum, or everlasting; a truly Christian love; from village and as for the violas, those persistent, blacksmiths, cottagers earning fouruntiring bloomers, where are they not? teen shillings a week, neighbors I see Snapdragons, white, yellow, and red, frequently, strangers I never saw but are much haunted by the sedulous once, when I got out of the saddle or bees, which sometimes experience no Veronica's Baddlesden car to go in and little difficulty, after once getting in, to say, "Will you give me a cutting of persuade them to answer to the magic your Woodruff ?" or, "Can you spare "Open sesame. What is there that me a piece of your rosemary?" grows more willingly, flowers longer, so pleasant to remember who it was or displays greater variety of color, that gave you your holy thistle, whom than penstemons ? and I have a small you petitioned for your statice or sea variety of them called chilone, which lavender, and from what fair plot you is especially graceful. A sense of an- brought the blue polyanthus you codcient peace abides amidst this republic dle so carefully, and with imperfect of flowers; but the rose, the rose, is results. A flower-border thus becomes queen. a living record and diary of your wanderings, your visits, your friendships, a perpetual reminiscence, of the generosity of the rich, of the graciousness When I read the debates It is Over and above fostering equanimity, the cultivation of a garden promotes the tenderer graces and extends the sweet charities of life. I need no in- of the poor. troduction to a person who has a garon Parish Councils, and what some den; and be his or her rank what it people say about the relations of may, in I go, opening the gate, whether squire, parson, and laborer, I fail to a huge iron or a humble wicket, with a recognize the England that I know. I proud confidence, certain to find a man hope they will not legislate it out of and a brother, or a woman and a sister. existence, nor substitute for "blue Love of gardening creates a safe free-spires of cottage smoke 'mid woodlands masonry among those who cherish it. sees too often in I stand on no ceremony, tender no excuse nor apology, proffer no introduction, but say at once, "What magnificent honeysuckle !" or, "Where do you get those splendid tuberous begonias?" and lo! we are friends at once. " what one green Dismantled towers, mean plots without a tree, A herd of hinds too equal to be free, How well the rustic children, themI have made many a lifelong friend selves the sweetest of woodland wild by a bold intrusion and immediate con- flowers, know who it is that cares for ference over a pœony or a Michaelmas the white water-lilies that grow in redaisy I had not seen before. I beg, mote ponds and pools, and so bring borrow, and, I verily believe, if need them to Veronica, six in a basket were, would steal, a cutting of any woven of green and brown reeds, quite beautiful plant that was a novelty. a work of art and taste, and say lispBut petty larceny is unnecessary; for ingly and with shy faces, when she asks them how much it is, " Thickth- | women who minister to the gourmanpenth, pleath, mith!" Whereupon, dise of men; and Veronica invariably Veronica gives them a shilling and an does her feminine best to promote orange apiece, or some bread and jam, and away they scamper, all their shyness gone as soon as they have turned the corner and are out of sight. Shakespeare calls spring "the sweet of the year." But I sometimes think the sweetest season of all is that when You scarce can say masculine indigestion. But flowers If it be summer still, or autumn yet: to stay. That is the season, just now; season of ripe fruits and quiet thoughts. Even Lamia cannot rouse nor fret me, and she has herself taken on something of the assenting aspect of the afternoon of the year. She follows me with all the quietness, and with more than the charm of an autumn shadow. Her speaking voice, always a contralto, seems to have acquired a yet deeper, rounder, and mellower tone, from the cheerful gravity of the season. She gibes less rarely, and hesitates to scoff even at my foibles. When we went, yesterday, into the nearest hop-garden, she picked sedulously for ten minutes into the basket of a comely villager with five youngsters round her, liberated from attendance at school for a more profitable task, and then emptied her purse, which I allow was not very full, among the nighest workers. They all brushed her feet, and I thought them very privileged to do so. I do not quite know how it is, but I observe that Veronica and the Poet seem to care for each other's company more than for ours, so that Lamia and I are left much together. She has, therefore, to accompany me in my garden rounds, and to make herself useful, which she appears more willing to do than formerly. She was always sweet; now she is serviceable as well. She carries the basket, when I make my daily scrutiny into the condition of the peaches, nectarines, plums, and pears, in the walled garden. As a rule, it is makes a charming picture with the hollyhocks and the great sunflowers. "Do you think," she asks, men are not mature till, like pears, they are black at heart, or the pips as you call them?" "Possibly," I answer; "just as women, like peaches, soften as they ripen." "You think I shall never be ripe? O, I have dirtied my frock! Lend me your handkerchief." Whereupon all the nectarines roll out of the basket, among the rank leaves of the seakale bed hard by, and we have such quiet pleasure in picking them up again. Those that are bruised we give to the housekeeper, to turn into jam; and woe betide the credit of the garden that I love, if it fail to furnish Veronica with an ample supply of material, in that form, for her storeroom. "Do give me a pear," says Lamia plaintively, as though I ever refuse her anything! "No, not those. I want a Conseiller de la Cour, the best pear that grows, for it is, as the Poet says of love, both sweet and bitter." "The wasps seem to be of the same opinion." "They never sting me. Perhaps that is because I am only bitter," she answers, and proceeds with the pear, with absolute confidence in her immunity. "We are going to take their nests to-night." "What fun! May I come? I saw a big one yesterday in the hedge-bank, in the lane going down to the bridge. Let us go and put a stick there, to mark it." The lane she speaks of leads to the river, and to an old mill beyond; a mill centuries old, and still worked in ancient fashion, and with every obsolete device. Long may it stand upon its antique ways, and link one yet closer with the past. I know nothing quieter than the pool above it; and where a trembling little wooden bridge crosses the narrow end near the sluice, Lamia and I have more than once held discourse that dips into the inner life. To-day not a breath rippled the surface of the water, or stirred a leaf of the woodlands that girt it. "How charming!" she exclaimed. "What is charm ?" I asked. "Charm," replied Lamia, "is mystery that is not wholly mysterious; the unknowable that is not altogether unknown. Sunshine, unqualified, untempered sunshine, does not charm, though it may delight; but sunshineshadow does, and autumn is the most charming of the seasons, because its shadows are the longest, the softest, and the most stationary. Charm withholds what it professes to reveal; and your garden is charming because it keeps back as much as it confers. Nature is charming, because, while seeming to hide nothing, she hides everything. Poetry charms, because it employs the real only to obtain credence for the ideal. Music is charming, because it touches the intangible. Who is it that says: Les choses qui arrivent nous touchent. Ce n'est que les choses qui n'arriveront jamais, qui nous fassent pleurer'?" To see all things in heavenly fantasy ; But it is difficult to see a garden party You would scarcely have thought we were the same persons that had held colloquy by the mill, had you seen us, at half past nine that night, sallying forth to take the wasps' nests, or at any rate, to see them taken by the old woodreeve, who prides himself, not without just cause, on being more knowing, in most matters, than the unobservant and unhandy pupils of free education. A lantern, a tin can containing cowdung, a spade, and a pocket full of fuses, were his stock in trade. Lamia had been reading, at Veronica's suggestion, an account of a new way of killing wasps, by placing tow steeped in cyanide of potassium at the entrance to their nests, and she could not help airing her new information. Her sciolism was treated with much fine scorn by the unlettered expert: "You see, miss, they don't know nothing about it, and that's why they writes in the papers. Them that knows doesn't "And so," continued Lamia, "it is write; they acts, miss, as I'm agoing only the things that are not, that to, now. Here's a big 'un, and no misare charming. Charm is suggestion. take. Look out, miss, there's some on Who are the charming people? The 'em outside, crawling about the hole, people whose manner is a frank re- and they might take a fancy to git up It is as fatal to charm to seem yer petticuts.” to be concealing anything, as it is to unveil everything. Charm is an open secret which no one knows." "I do not know," I answered, "but it is a true and a lovely saying." serve. "What are the fuses made of?" said Lamia. "Brimstone and saltpetre, miss, with a little pinch o' powder. But would now sing something grave and don't you go buy fuses, or they'll hap- sad. I was not mistaken, for she at pen blow hand off, they've so much once began:yer powder in them. I makes these myself. Now you see how they work." He lighted one of his fuses, which burned quietly and steadily, placed it, rammed it into the hole, and then daubed the aperture over with the contents of his can. "But I don't hear it explode," said Lamia. "And you won't, miss. And they won't hear it, neither; but it'll quieten 'em, I reckon." "And are they all done for?" out. "Them that's grown up, yes; but not the little uns that hasn't yet come And whether you use fuses or that other stuff you spoke of, you must dig out the nest to-morrow, and swamp 'em with water, and stamp all the life out of 'em, or you might just as well have stayed in bed." "How much better," said Lamia, after we had bidden our companion and his lantern good-night, "these peasant folk talk than we do, when they talk at all." "I am glad you have observed it," I said; "they are so much nearer to the fact, whereas, as a rule, we utter only the literary representation of the fact. After all, is literature more than an excrescence on natural human speech? " "A fungus, in fact. Let us go, and communicate our discovery to the Poet." "Where are he and Veronica, I wonder?" Let the weary world go round! Life's a surfeiting of sound; It would be so sweet to lie Under waving grasses, Where a shadow fleeting by Sometimes passes. Why, why remain ? Against life's pain; O death! beautiful death! I pine much to be going: To know what they are knowing. Accept thy banishment; Like other sorrows, life will end for thee: Yet for a little while Bear with this harsh exile, And Death will soften, and will send for thee. "When did you write that?" I asked. "O, long ago," said the Poet t; "more under the influence of Rome, the Rome ruinous that then was, than from any personal feeling. It is rather elementary, not to say naif, in expression, it was sincere, when written." but "I am prepared," said Lamia, "to defend its elementariness. I wish there were more elementary verses. Too many persons to-day write as though they were in the sixth form, and had a prize poem in their head." As a fact, they were indoors, as we found when we ourselves entered. Lamia went straight to the piano; and I felt certain that, with her passion for "I fear you are right," he answered. sudden contrasts, and her impatience "It is fatal to a writer of verse to of the prolongation of any mood into think, or even be aware, of an audiwhich she might have been betrayed ence. As Mill said so admirably, by surrounding circumstances, she Poetry should not be heard, but over heard. The self-consciousness of the | however, just as well have remained, stylist-forgive the employment of for I could not sleep, and was up and his designation of himself—is intoler- about in the garden the better part of able." an hour before sunrise. It is the most "Does it not," asked Veronica, who beautiful of all the twenty-four, and was only, I felt quite sure, reproducing whenever I have the good fortune to with touching servility, one of the lit-awake about that time during the erary canons the Poet had, at some months when I occupy my summer time or another, expounded to her, "does not an ever-present anxiety as to style indicate poverty of matter and shallowness of feeling?" 66 Or," suggested Veronica timidly, "whose accent you remark rather than his observations." 66 "But surely," said Lamia, who could not stand this Amabean style of criticism, a poet must be aware of what he is doing when he writes a long tragic, epic, or idyllic poem, and must give himself some conscious concern as to how he is doing it." bedroom, I always, like the youth to fortune and to fame unknown, in Gray's poem, brush, though with no hasty feet, the dews away. So the “I should have thought so," he said. dawn be clear, leaf and flower, under "If a man have the singing faculty, and above, are then delicately varand have got anything to say, the mat-nished with dew, even in the hottest ter will dictate the style. The moment and driest summer weather, not altoone notices how a thing is being said, gether unlike the moisture one sees more than what is being said, one may sometimes on the face of sleeping chilbe pretty sure either that little or noth-dren. In spring and early summer, so ing is being said, or is being said many birds are singing at that hour, wrongly. A poet whose style is more that one would almost think there could noticeable than his thought or his sen- scarcely be room in the air for all their timent resembles a man whose clothes notes. Just now, however, they are you look at, rather than at himself.” silent; and therefore one notices the flowers all the more. The evening primroses were lighting up the garden with their yellow cressets, and smelling, thus bedewed, just like new-made butter. Their Greek name of Ænothera signifies a wine-trap, and is there not a certain roundabout appropriateness in the designation, since they certainly make a night of it, and refuse to go home till morning? Wandering round to the back, I found the blackcaps fluttering about and feasting on the ripened seeds of the giant kex, or New Zealand parsnips, that grow among the gooseberry bushes, and they were so pleased with their occupation that they took no heed of me, though I stood within a couple of feet of them, watching their graceful but greedy antics as they fed or flew, head downward, about the seeded umbels. Now, there were no gooseberries to distract me, but I remembered how deliciously cold, indeed iced, they used to be at that hour in the month when they were ripe, and how the blackbirds, discriminating epicures that they are, would They were getting a little beyond my not look at any but the hairy red ones, depth, so I quietly slipped out of the the sweetest and most satisfactory of room, and therefore cannot say how all. The Gloire-de-Dijon roses along the conversation ended. I might, the wire fencing were all bediamonded "I presume so," "said the Poet, "more especially in the conceiving or shaping of it, though I think he will act wisely to wait and allow the germ or embryo of it, when it first comes to him, to grow of itself, and naturally, within his mind, rather than to force and artificially develop it. Growing by this method, a poem becomes an organism. Produced by the other, it is a mechanism. The latter may be a most beautiful piece of work, but it simulates rather than possesses life. I suspect the schemes even of the greatest and the longest poems are, like the language and music of the best lyrics, fortuitous felicities." |