I
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 SECOND SERIES
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 THE 
 
 GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED _AUSTIN_ 
 
 POET LAUREATE 
 
 Vola cm gli occhi per questo giardino, 
 Che -verier ltd t' accendera lo sguardo 
 Piu a montar per lo raggio divino. 
 
 DANTZ, Di-vina Commedia, Par. C. xxxi. vv. 97-99 
 
 Retired Leisure, 
 That in trim gardens takes his pleasure. 
 
 MILTON, // Penseroso 
 
 MACM1LLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1907
 
 TO THE GENTLE READER 
 
 You may perhaps have observed that, whenever the author 
 of l The Garden That I Love ' feels himself in a difficulty , 
 he invariably has recourse either to Veronica, to whom he 
 assigns his more romantic, or to the Poet whom he makes 
 responsible for his more prosaic observations, but most of all 
 to me, who am expected to pose in every imaginable attitude 
 for his convenience. Having gradually become, by long 
 maltreatment, steeped in sufferance, I have submitted to it 
 all ; and now he appeals to me afresh, and begs me to 
 put on what he calls my most engaging manner, in order 
 to propitiate all gentle readers, and to persuade you to 
 tolerate a continuation or sequel to the volume by which he 
 first became known to you. He is observant enough to be 
 aware that striking the rock twice is, as a rule, rather a 
 useless performance, but is pleased to believe, or at any rate 
 to urge, that I have a special divining rod of my own, 
 and can turn on a stream of interest from unsuspected 
 
 sources. 
 
 v
 
 vi THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Yes, it is to me he has recourse, when he is in a difficulty, 
 and when I am in a difficulty, I seek relief from the Poet, 
 and have accordingly done so on the present occasion. Never 
 at a loss for an indulgent, or, as Veronica would say, a 
 conscienceless, excuse for everything and everybody, he 
 remarks, c // seems to me, my dear, that hardly anything 
 was ever said more untrue than that there is nothing new 
 under the sun.' 
 
 4 >uite so,' I replied, unable to resist the temptation, 
 ' there is nothing new, except the old.'' 
 
 1 That is one way of putting it,' he resumed, in the same 
 tolerant tone, l and perhaps as good a way as any. The 
 old that is really good and great is always new, and the 
 new that is bad or mediocre is old the day after it is born. 
 One sometimes hears it said that a subject has been done to 
 death. Then bring it to life again, if you can, by breathing 
 into it your own personality, your mind, heart, and soul.'' 
 
 1 But if you have not got any of these, and are destitute 
 of personality,' I objected, ' as indeed most people are ? ' 
 
 * Then they must not waste time in flogging dead horses' 
 
 1 Is not that my unfortunate case ? ' / asked. 
 
 I shall not record his reply, being much too modest to do 
 so, but will content myself with saying that it was 'just 
 like him' But, having got to the end of his too partial 
 favour for the questioner, he went on, ' Moreover, after 
 the lapse of a dozen or so years, the same thing is no longer
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE vii 
 
 the same thing. Nothing remains or can remain stationary. 
 Oneself has become more or less somebody else ; and the Garden 
 that we love, and its infatuated adorers, must also have 
 changed in the interval. So, if it ever was worth seeing, 
 you may depend on its being worth seeing still ; and if what 
 was written about it last century was worth reading, it 
 will bear being written about in this. " The Odyssey" like 
 every great poem, is just as new to-day as though it had 
 Jirst appeared yesterday morning, while the popular novel of 
 a decade ago is now unreadable. So that one comes round 
 to your first observation that there is little which is new, 
 except the old, the old that was at its birth really good." 1 
 
 Of course, if the Poet had been the author of ' The 
 Garden That I Love,' he could not have made this last 
 observation. I sometimes wonder who was, and from 
 time to time flatter myself that I wrote it. But then, as 
 some indiscreet persons, I am told, have asked, Who is 
 Lamia f Am I anything more than the Poet's dream ? If 
 1 could only persuade myself of that, I should be perfectly 
 happy. 
 
 Meanwhile, dear gentle reader, be, if possible, more 
 gentle than ever, and come and see our really retired and 
 retiring home whenever you feel disposed. If you are exception- 
 ally respectable, Veronica, with her inexhaustible good nature, 
 will take you round. If you have a lively sense of humour, 
 tempered by occasional ebullitions, not too prolonged, of
 
 viii THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 romantic sentiment, to me will fall the honour of being your 
 guide and companion. If you have the good fortune to be 
 comely to look on, or very attractive, it is just possible 
 that the Poet himself will, quite accidentally, make his 
 appearance, and saunter with you in its shadiest places. 
 Even then, I shall not be far off. 
 
 LAMIA.
 
 I 
 
 The Longest Day. Some too partial persons have 
 been pleased to say that not only the writing of 
 books concerning gardens, but the growing affec- 
 tion for them, owes something to The Garden that 
 I Love. I am so little of an author, though so 
 much of a gardener in a small way, that I fear 
 the expression of this belief gives one a certain 
 amount of pleasure, since even the most unambitious 
 persons have, in their hearts, the foible of self- 
 complacency as much as the most soaring. But 
 this weakness receives its corrective from Lamia's 
 irony and the Poet's chastening sense. 
 
 * That you were first in the field,' she says, * in 
 what I once called horticultural literature, I remem- 
 ber your saying in a moment of self-pluming, which 
 I have noticed is common to neglected writers. 
 But even the vanity of authorship cannot disguise 
 from you that, though you may have learnt some- 
 
 I B
 
 2 THE GARDEN THAT I LOyE 
 
 thing since then, you were rather a novice in 
 horticulture when you first wrote on the subject, 
 and that, in all which makes the true expert, you 
 have been utterly outstripped since by some of 
 your successors, who have towered high above 
 your shoulders. Moreover, if I am to sit in the 
 judgment -seat, and administer equity all round, 
 you would cut a sorry figure among the writers of 
 Garden Books, strictly so called, had it not been 
 for the verses interspersed through your work, 
 and which I yes, I procured for you, and 
 which the writers, whom you would like to think 
 your successors, have considerately abstained from 
 imitating.' 
 
 I always listen to Lamia's chastening humour, 
 even when indulged at my expense, with un- 
 qualified pleasure, for, in truth, I am infatuated 
 enough to like listening to anything she says, or 
 watching anything she does ; and more followed, 
 to the same effect. But, conscious that there 
 should be, as in all things, a limit to what has 
 been called the Literature of Egotism, I will desist 
 from reproducing more of the sort on that subject. 
 
 The Poet's observations on the matter amounted 
 in substance to pretty much the same thing as 
 Lamia's gossamer persiflage.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 3 
 
 * What is Priority ? Somebody must speak first, 
 in this reserved English world ; and then every- 
 body's tongue gradually gets loosened. We are all 
 indebted to some one, indeed to many another. We 
 have heard much, in our time, of self-made men ; 
 but I venture to say there can be no such thing, 
 now that there have been on the earth so many 
 generations of mankind, as a self-made man. 
 Forgive me if I once again plead for what I have 
 more than once called the Parent Past. No man 
 nowadays can possibly be only himself, since there 
 is in him no little of his father and mother, grand- 
 fathers and grandmothers, great-great-grandfathers 
 and their wives, to say nothing of spiritual god- 
 fathers and godmothers, the Hebrew Prophets, 
 Saint Luke, Saint Paul, Homer, Hesiod, Theo- 
 critus, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and 
 the rest, who were, so to speak, at our christening, 
 and have given us much more than a silver mug 
 and spoon, or to vary the metaphor, were our 
 foster-parents almost from the first, and helped 
 us from their capacious springs of life and health 
 to grow in grace and strength. Let no one pique 
 himself on absolute originality, for in truth there 
 is no such thing, save of the wrong sort, which 
 perhaps abounds overmuch in these novelty-
 
 4 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 demanding days, but, rather, humbly render 
 thanks if we have been able to make a slight con- 
 tribution towards the Present and the Future, 
 in return for all we have inherited from the 
 Past.' 
 
 Veronica listened intently, for she likes her 
 poet best in these equitable moments, having a 
 hearty distaste for anything approaching to self- 
 laudation. ' May I endorse, dear,' she adds, 
 ' every word of what you have been saying ? 
 Even Coriolanus must have been wrong when he 
 exclaimed, " Alone I did it ! " ' 
 
 Is not the foregoing just ? Books, all books, 
 all good books at least, like all good gardens, owe 
 much to people who did not actually create them. 
 People living and dead, things past and present, 
 all are contributories to that diminutive stream, 
 oneself ; a reflection which is essentially consoling, 
 since it associates one with the sum of things, and 
 prevents one from living in barren isolation. It 
 has the further advantage of confirming the Poet's 
 favourite admonition, ' Repress your antipathies, 
 cultivate your sympathies.' I have found that 
 piece of advice very helpful in regard to gardens, 
 though one must not be so excessively tolerant as 
 not to allow that there are some bad, very bad,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 5 
 
 even insufferably bad gardens ; and these are, for 
 the most part, gardens on which money has been 
 lavishly expended. We were all much gratified 
 on hearing from an amiable lady that, in our 
 absence, she had asked a high dignitary of the 
 Church who paid the garden that we love the 
 compliment of coming to see it, what it was that 
 made its charm, and that he replied, ' Obviously, 
 Mind.' I think he might have added, ' and 
 Heart.' I understand him to have meant that 
 somebody's thoughts, somebody's root -principles 
 in Art and taste in colour, had co-operated in its 
 creation, and still presided over its existence. But, 
 without the adjunct of heart, or Love, all the 
 Mind in the world is powerless to produce the 
 result that attracts and enthralls. Not only one 
 must take pains with a thing, one must take 
 pleasure in it as well. Bad gardens are either 
 mindless, or heartless, or both. I am not talking 
 of flowers, even the finest flowers. That demands 
 but little thinking, and no loving whatever. 
 There is no more difficulty in having splendid- 
 looking rose-blooms, or huge carnations, than in 
 growing giant beetroot or colossal potatoes. But 
 that is not gardening. Magical gardening is quite 
 another matter.
 
 6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 And now for a hazardous avowal. No prize- 
 craving specimens have ever been sent hence to 
 a Flower Show, either national or local. But we 
 say among ourselves that if any one will offer a 
 prize for the most satisfying garden, week after 
 week and month after month, from, say, St. 
 Valentine's Day to the close of Saint Luke's 
 summer, the garden that we love will enter for 
 the competition, and take its chance. We do not 
 mean that it will be adjudged the Prize, but that 
 the conditions are such as the lovers of gardens, 
 as distinct from mere growers of flowers, though 
 of course good gardening includes and embraces 
 these, can cheerfully accept and abide by. I 
 know nothing more misleading to the novice in 
 gardening than Horticultural Shows, whether held 
 at Holland House, in the Temple Gardens, or in 
 any less famous spot. He will see there the most 
 astonishingly perfect flowers, but will not know 
 how much careful coddling they have undergone, 
 what merciless disbudding, in many instances, 
 there has been, and how many secondary blooms 
 have been sacrificed in order to produce a prize- 
 securing effect at one given moment. The flowers 
 themselves are lovely to look at ; but neither the 
 means employed, nor the end attained, is gardening ;
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 7 
 
 nor will they enable any one to have a garden 
 rightly so called. 
 
 The above opinion elicited from the Poet one 
 of his philosophic reflections : ' I suppose,' he 
 said, ' perfection, like other good things, is to be 
 attained only at a price, and the price is the 
 sacrificing of something less perfect, for which, 
 withal, perhaps on account of our own imperfec- 
 tion, we cannot help craving.' 
 
 * Does not the same thing, as you yourself have 
 more than once explained,' asked Lamia, ' hold 
 good of Literature, alike in verse and prose ? As 
 regards what people still seem, in the abstract, to 
 regard as the finest flower of Literature, namely 
 Poetry, there are the two schools of opinion, two 
 camps of taste and preference, the one insisting on 
 the most painstaking execution possible, and the 
 absence of anything like blot or blemish, the other 
 inclining to a broader treatment and less finished 
 style ; or say, the artistically wrought detail of 
 Tennyson, and the negligent grandeur of Byron. 
 For more than a generation the former has been in 
 favour with the majority of readers, though perhaps 
 there are some signs of that preference declining.' 
 
 Whenever Lamia talks seriously, Veronica only 
 too willingly contributes to the conversation, and
 
 8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 so observed, when Lamia ceased, 'Would it not 
 be interesting to inquire what these recurring 
 oscillations of taste and preference depend on ? 
 In respect of what Lamia has been suggesting, I 
 am disposed to suspect that the explanation is to 
 be sought in the circumstance whether the age 
 happens to be mainly masculine or predominantly 
 feminine in character, whether it be a stormy, 
 seething, and tumultuous time, or one of com- 
 paratively placid airs and unruffled waters. Byron 
 is as masculine in his writings as a poet well can 
 be ; for, in addition to his own tempestuous char- 
 acter, he lived in a time of electric skies, stormful 
 flashes, and incessant thunder-peals. With what 
 instantaneous sincerity, with what masculine reck- 
 lessness, he gave expression to both ! Quotation 
 will best illustrate one's meaning : 
 
 Could I embody and unbosom now 
 That which is most within me, could I wreak 
 My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw 
 Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, 
 All that I would have sought, and all I seek, 
 Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe, into one word, 
 And that one word were lightning, I would speak. 
 
 In the same longing to identify and incorporate 
 himself with stress and tumult, he exclaims, when
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 9 
 
 describing the thunderstorm in the Alps at 
 
 night 
 
 Let me be 
 
 A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, 
 A portion of the tempest and of thee ! 
 
 There one has the whole man, or, rather, the 
 whole Poet, unveiled. He seeks for one word, 
 one concentrated aspect and operation of Nature, 
 in which to embody and wherein to mirror him- 
 self; and he finds it in the word Lightning. 
 Again, how he discloses himself, and reflects the 
 period in which he lived and wrote, with its 
 furibund tides and clashing waves, when he 
 writes 
 
 Once more upon the waters ! Yet once more ! 
 And the waves bound beneath me as a steed 
 That knows its rider ! Welcome to their roar ! 
 Swift to their guidance, wheresoe'er they lead ! 
 
 They rejoice him all the more as the freshening 
 sea makes them a terror ; and he exultingly says 
 of the ocean 
 
 I am, as it were, a child of thee. 
 
 How could such a Poet concern himself overmuch 
 to ask if this flashing wave of thought was kempt 
 and curled to its very fringe and spray, or if that
 
 io THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 hurricane of feeling was as measured and musical 
 as a cadence of Mozart.' 
 
 I thought it was very praiseworthy in Veronica 
 to express herself thus, for her own taste in litera- 
 ture, and above all in poetry, inclines to the 
 greatest finish, and is averse to the hit-or-miss 
 style of some writers ; and I could see it gave 
 the Poet pleasure to hear what she had just been 
 saying. 
 
 * I can imagine,' he observed, * nothing more 
 true than what Veronica has just been urging. 
 But I should like to add a word in favour of a 
 theory of my own, such as it is, that, though 
 probably no writer can wholly escape the influence 
 of the age in which he happens to live, I doubt if 
 that influence will be of much help or advantage 
 to him unless it be in harmony with his own 
 temperament. The more he yields to it, unless 
 it be congenial to him, the more he sacrifices of 
 himself; and to be oneself, in writing as in any- 
 thing else, is to give one the best chance, not of 
 popularity, but of doing the best work, and the 
 best sort of work, for which one is by nature 
 endowed. The Man does not necessarily chime 
 with the Hour. But, in Byron's case, the Man 
 and the Hour met to perfection. The age in
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE n 
 
 which he lived was very like himself in most 
 respects, and he resembled in essentials the age in 
 which he lived. You may be born out of your 
 own time ; and, in that case, you may, if weak 
 and yielding, be reduced to silence, or, if strong 
 and with abundant power of resistance, have to 
 wait for the chance of some future age being more 
 in agreement with you. Macaulay says that 
 Byron would have been a popular writer in any 
 age. I venture to doubt that. Had he been 
 born so as to arrive at manhood, say, about the 
 time of the first Reform Bill, and the heyday of 
 his life been from that date onward to the Great 
 Exhibition of 1851, he would necessarily either 
 have remained himself, on which supposition he 
 would have been out of tune with the time, and 
 therefore by no possibility popular, or he would 
 have striven to divest himself of a portion of his 
 own genius, whereby he would have suffered a 
 serious loss of power, and fallen, as the phrase 
 is, between two stools. Being impenitently com- 
 bative, he would have chafed against his time, 
 which would have disliked his impetuosity, and 
 turned away from his negligent grandeur, since 
 uncongenial to its own preferences. As it was, he 
 was born and wrote in the very nick of time, while,
 
 12 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 during the same period, Wordsworth and Keats, 
 with temperaments and genius the very opposite 
 of his, had .to wait for recognition till there 
 supervened a more quietistic and less tumultuous 
 epoch. Byron resembles Vesuvius in eruption at 
 night, flashing fire through volumes of smoke, 
 while one hears as a sad soft accompaniment the 
 undertone sobbing of the sea in the Bay below. 
 Hence his fitfulness, his inequality, his frequent 
 faults of style and expression, hence the instant- 
 aneous magnificence of his best passages. Then 
 the language, as he says of the sea in the passage 
 Veronica has cited, seems to know its rider. He 
 is incorporated with it, as he is with the hills when 
 he declares of the mountains, not that he feels 
 them, but that with him, they " are a feeling." 
 Hence he shares with them their sublimity, but, 
 likewise, and not infrequently, their ruggedness, 
 their inequality, their repulsiveness. But, at his 
 very best, he is flawless, without blot or blemish. 
 Is not The Isles of Greece the finest lyric in the 
 language ? I remember, when we were all in 
 Rome together, being in the Capitoline Museum 
 one day and turning to the pages of the Guide 
 Book for verification of something about which 
 I was in doubt, and coming on two stanzas of his,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 13 
 
 tolerably familiar to one, but which I thereupon 
 read afresh. Pausing at the end of the first stanza, 
 which was rather slovenly, I said to myself, " So- 
 and-so " (having in my mind his only successor 
 that has rivalled him in popularity during lifetime) 
 "would not have been satisfied to have written 
 like that." Then I read on, and, at the end of the 
 second stanza, felt forced to add, "But he could 
 not have written that" ; so instantaneous, direct, 
 and overpowering was it.' 
 
 * It is perhaps presumptuous in me,' said Lamia 
 modestly, 'to add anything to what you and 
 Veronica, between you, have been saying. But 
 is not something still wanted to state the whole 
 truth, something that I suspect was in the mind 
 of both, though neither has given utterance to it ? 
 There is no difficulty in surmising who " So-and- 
 so " is, who was Byron's successor in contem- 
 poraneous popularity, who the delightful poet 
 and consummate artist to whom you referred. 
 He likewise had the good fortune not to be born 
 out of his own time, but in it absolutely, and to 
 be all through the meridian of his poetic activity 
 one with it ? A second time as far as poets are 
 concerned, the Hour and the Man met and 
 co-operated. But what a different Hour and
 
 14 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 what a different Man ! Like the thunderstorm 
 described in Vivien as " moaning into other lands," 
 Byron's thunder-notes had rolled away ; and there 
 were instead, " languid pulses of the oar," " the 
 long gray fields at night," " the glimmering dawn/* 
 " the lime a summer home of murmurous wings," 
 " bowery hollows crowned with summer sea," " O 
 death in life, the days that are no more," and 
 such passages as 
 
 The steer forgot to graze, 
 
 And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood, 
 Leaning his horns into the neighbour field, 
 And lowing to his fellows. From the woods 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
 
 Such are the thousand-and-one exquisite touches, 
 the magical lines, the passages brief but all-suffic- 
 ing, that enchanted a generation, and can never 
 fail to delight lovers of perfect poetic Art. And 
 what was the central and best period of his pro- 
 ductivity ? It began in 1832, and culminated, in 
 the opinion of most, about thirty years later, a 
 long time for a poet to be at his best ; and, with 
 the exception of the miscarriage of the revolu- 
 tionary attempts of 1848, not to be followed by 
 real new birth till the Commune of 1871, the 
 thirty years after 1832 were years of "peace,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 15 
 
 retrenchment, and reform," the gradual abolition 
 of abuses, and optimistic horoscopes of the pacific, 
 harmonious, refined Future of Mankind. Hence, 
 in accordance with the theory advanced by 
 Veronica, the Hour helped the Man, and the 
 Man was the artistic mirror of the Hour. Have 
 I,' she added, drawing closer to the Poet, * been 
 talking nonsense, and only travestying what 
 Veronica and you have been saying ? If so, 
 forgive me.' 
 
 ' Dear Lamia,' he said, ' I have been listening 
 to you with unqualified approval. You have 
 rounded off our conference, and by exhausting it 
 have brought it to a harmonious conclusion.' 
 
 I thought to myself that if I ventured to add 
 to the literature of egotism by extolling the 
 Garden that I Love in the same * harmonious 
 manner' in which our mutual-admiration-society 
 had been seconding each other's views about 
 poetry, Lamia would have gone round it until 
 she had found some abominable flaw, some flower 
 that had failed, some combination of colour that 
 had only partially succeeded, and made me smart 
 for my self-complacency. 
 
 But surely she would find it difficult to dis- 
 cover flaws at this moment. I have never been
 
 1 6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 able to reconcile myself quite to rose-beds pure 
 and simple, with nothing to decorate the inter- 
 spaces. Accordingly I persuaded the Poet to put, 
 in a newly planted rose-bed that has done, this 
 very first year, excellently well, and will continue 
 to flower during the rest of the year till very 
 severe frost comes, since they are all tea roses, 
 groups of longiflorum lilies, now in all the snowy 
 splendour of their long large bells and healthy 
 green leaves ; and the effect is most pleasing. I 
 ought to add that the bed has a wide border of 
 lilac -coloured violas, which take their catalogue 
 name, I believe, from some nurseryman, but which 
 we call Quaker Pet, by reason of their subdued 
 lilac hues. Among the rose-beds there are specio- 
 sum lilies, and in yet others the gorgeous Lilium 
 japonicum. The method can be applied with 
 equal success, indeed perhaps with still more, to 
 beds of certain China roses. With one of these 
 given up to Laurette Messimy, I have, flowering 
 among them, annual marguerite carnations, and 
 the combination has elicited much admiration. 
 Not far from it is another China rose-bed dappled, 
 so to speak, with Salvia farinacea, whose flowers, 
 to the eye of the uninstructed, look for all the 
 world like lavender.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 17 
 
 Apropos of lavender, of which Lamia is parti- 
 cularly fond, I have a little story to tell which 
 I will set down here, since the telling of it to 
 some of our garden visitors has seemed to interest 
 them. Several years ago I was at Stratford-on- 
 Avon, then still more or less left to its primitive 
 quiet and unpretentiousness ; the house in which 
 Shakespeare is reputed to have been born, looking 
 then much more credibly such than what this 
 age calls improvements have made it look. Yet 
 more surrendered to the kindly nursing of Time 
 and untouched by the tidying, smartening -up 
 tastes of to-day, was Anne Hathaway's cottage at 
 Shotover, which exercised over me a peculiar spell, 
 drawing me back to it afternoon after afternoon. 
 I suppose I was influenced by the feeling that the 
 young Shakespeare had been in its garden many 
 a time and oft, by moonlight, in starlight, at all 
 hours of the day and night, and equally so in the 
 ingle-nook of its cottage hearth. The wrinkled 
 old dame who then lived there believed herself to 
 be, and probably was, a collateral descendant of 
 Anne Hathaway ; and she got so accustomed to 
 my daily visits that we became close friends, and 
 used to sit together, with her nut-brown hand in 
 mine, and let our talk ramble backward in a dear, 
 
 c
 
 1 8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ignorant, semi-imaginative sort of way ; and once 
 we had tea together, which pleased her vastly and 
 me no less. She seemed to feel real regret when 
 I told her I was leaving Stratford on the morrow ; 
 so, before we parted, she led me into the cottage 
 garden, as rustic as herself, plucked a large bunch 
 of lavender twigs, and, as she gave them to me, 
 
 said 
 
 ' If you plant out these in May, 
 They will grow both night and day.' 
 
 Sure enough, May it was ; but, though I was 
 leaving Stratford, I was not going home for some 
 days yet. So I kept the lavender-twigs moist in 
 my sponge-bag ; and from these, for the kindly 
 old lady's rhyming saw came true, is descended 
 all the lavender that Lamia loves so. I had the 
 honour for, as you may suppose, such indeed I 
 deemed it of giving some cuttings of it to 
 Tennyson for his garden at Aldworth ; and, later 
 on, to the most gifted English actress of our 
 time, who has appeared in every leading female 
 part of humour, majesty, and playfulness in 
 Shakespeare's dramas, to the delectation of us all. 
 Do you wonder if we always call our lavender 
 * Anne Hathaway 's Lavender ' ? It is now nearly 
 in full bloom; and I noticed to-day the white
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 19 
 
 butterflies flitting over and among it, almost as 
 thick as fireflies among the ripening corn of a 
 Tuscan podere. 
 
 I believe I have said somewhere that among all 
 the princely personages of the garden, the Rose, 
 the Rose is queen. But now, in the very heart of 
 June, I feel that neither I, nor any one, has written 
 of the Rose as it deserves. The Poet is con- 
 tinually admonishing me not to indulge in the 
 prevailing sin of exaggeration and excessive em- 
 phasis in style. But what language, what music, 
 could overmuch extol the beauty, the splendour, the 
 homeliness, the pride, the humility, the fragrance,- 
 the independence, the accommodating temper, 
 the clambering, rambling, creeping vagrancy of 
 the Rose ? At this moment the world seems 
 one vast rose-garden. Veronica, who sparingly 
 breaks into paeans of enthusiasm, deeming it better, 
 in that terrible conscience of hers, to temper our 
 exuberant admiration with measured eulogies, re- 
 turns again and again to the beds bordered by 
 the subdued lilac loveliness of Quaker Maid violas, 
 but for the rest dedicated to the roses, from snowy 
 white to dazzling scarlet, got from France last 
 November, and now in their virgin bloom. But 
 the Poet prefers bushes of Maiden's-Blush, where
 
 20 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 they keep company with long unfettered trailers 
 of single, double, and semi-double briars, soaring, 
 curving, falling, sweeping the ground, breathing 
 and blooming in their own heedless, Bohemian 
 way. I need scarcely add that where the Poet is, 
 there too is Lamia ; and Lamia introduces the 
 feminine note into the colour and perfume of this 
 secluded spot by proclaiming that the Rose and 
 Love are one ; at the same time asking him 
 
 ' Are they not ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, Lamia,' he answers gallantly, ' Love and 
 the Rose are one ; and you are one with both.' 
 
 Never did I see two such persons for thinking, 
 feeling, and saying the same thing, at the same 
 moment, in the same manner. ' Happy, happy, 
 happy pair ! ' I am forced to exclaim, in the 
 language of Dryden's Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia s 
 Day. None will deny that Lamia is fair ; and 
 assuredly, in respect of his tender affection for 
 her, the Poet is the bravest of the brave. I wish 
 I had half his courage. 
 
 But the Rose. Was not that my theme ? 
 And here am I, diverted from it by Lamia and 
 her unaccountable attractiveness. What is there 
 the Rose cannot, and will not do ? It will cover 
 the Palaces of Kings, and just as gladly embroider
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 21 
 
 the porches of the lowly. It is as happy in the 
 untrimmed hedge as in the well-ordered garden. 
 It can look after itself, and needs no more help 
 than the cloud or the wave. Yet it tolerates 
 interference with no loss of temper, and with its 
 habitual smile. The Rose is queen, but is a 
 countrymaid likewise. It belongs to no class, but 
 is at home with all. Of all love -gifts it is the 
 most expressive and the most seductive. Is not 
 the well-known Rose of Magdeburg one of the 
 most touching incidents in history ? What a low 
 fellow, deep down, with the soul of an Italian 
 postilion, was Napoleon, to be so unchivalrous 
 yes, brutally disingenuous, to the lovely Queen of 
 Prussia! Roses welcome our birth, are sponsors 
 at the baptismal font, bridesmaids at our nuptials, 
 mourners and white-robed petitioners to heaven at 
 our interment. They hold their full Court only 
 in summer, but they reign during three of the 
 seasons of the year, and are not always absent 
 from their kingdom during the fourth. And how 
 they vary in character ! some being retiringly shy, 
 some self-possessed and dauntless, some attractively 
 modest, while others seem proud of and almost 
 flaunt their beauty. There are roses that seem to 
 think they are the plain ones of the family, and
 
 22 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 seek to hide themselves and escape attention. 
 But, as Veronica remarked yesterday, the nearer 
 that garden roses approximate to the wild eglan- 
 tine, the more they charm. Some of the new 
 Ramblers Blush Rambler, for instance make 
 you stop and look at them just as children do. 
 But I must not excite jealousy among them by 
 naming some and being silent about others. 
 Besides, have you not remarked there are roses 
 that, like human beings, look their best at one 
 age, their least well at another ? The handsome 
 youth sometimes expands into a man you do not 
 turn to look at, and another, unnoticeable in the 
 meridian of his life, becomes picturesque-looking 
 in his decline. It is the same with Roses ; save 
 that, like women, they are never altogether plain 
 at any age, if one lingers on their looks, and only 
 has eyes wherewith to see. 
 
 Lamia, who has read the foregoing, and says 
 nothing in contradiction of it, and who has access 
 to all the Poet's MSS., shows me the following 
 Sonnet as in some degree bearing on the above 
 theme, and says that perhaps it will, for some 
 readers, render my fresh instalment of ' horti- 
 cultural literature ' more tolerable. So, obedient 
 to her wishes, I append it. I ask her when she
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 23 
 
 thinks it was written, and she answers character- 
 istically, but perhaps not untruly, * Probably some 
 ten or fifteen years hence.' 
 
 In this resplendent Autumn of your days 
 You seem yet lovelier even than in Spring, 
 More musical in voice, more young in gaze, 
 More dear, more richly dowered in everything. 
 Now in your promise lurks no veering vow, 
 Nor in your tearful tenderness caprice ; 
 Blossom and fruit together deck you now, 
 And Love abides, companioned by Peace. 
 O keep then as you are, nor let Time cast 
 One shadow on the dial of your days, 
 Nor wintry rime nor desolating blast 
 That beauty rob where nothing yet decays. 
 But should that last petition be denied, 
 You still will find me, reverent, at your side. 
 
 One would naturally expect peace to reign un- 
 interrupted in a Garden, if anywhere. The very 
 word suggests tranquillity, retirement, aloofness 
 from contending passion, even from conflicting 
 emotions, and, above all, from the heats of con- 
 troversy, and, doubtless, what the name suggests, 
 the garden itself corresponds with, to the casual 
 unconcerned visitor, who, coming to it from the 
 paving-stones of Pall Mall, or the ballroom floors 
 of Mayfair, exclaims, * There ! ' seats himself 
 among its invisible perfumes, lets his eye wander
 
 24 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 over its rainbow colours, or saunters among its 
 summer roses or its autumnal lilies. But, be 
 yourself the owner, nay more, the conceiver and 
 guardian of the Garden, you will indeed be the 
 favoured of Heaven, with not even the ' critic on 
 the hearth ' to dispute your sway, if the demon of 
 disagreement do not find his way into your earthly 
 paradise. Indeed, if you be a person of many 
 minds and many moods, varying winds of doctrine 
 will from time to time disturb your peace, and 
 rival theories of horticulture, as of writing, will 
 invade your serenity. 
 
 ' How very irregular,' says Veronica, ' the 
 things in this bed are looking ! ' 
 
 'I did not want them,' I reply, 'to be quite 
 regular, but they will be regular enough when 
 they have all attained their full growth.' 
 
 ' And pray,' strikes in Lamia, ' pray, when will 
 that be ? I observe that the Golden Year is 
 always coming, but never comes. Will it arrive 
 just as the early October frosts wither all your 
 posies ? At present I see the grossest irregularities 
 in this supposed respectable enclosure. Not that, 
 personally, I have the slightest objection to irregu- 
 larity, for I am not going to cast stones from my 
 own glass-house ; but, as you sometimes say,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 25 
 
 let us look facts frankly in the face, and manfully 
 of course, manfully confess that this is at 
 present a rag-bag of a bed, with no apparent design 
 in it, and luxuriating in conspicuous disorder.' 
 
 The Poet smiles, and, as usual, strives to make 
 us all ' harmonious ' once more. 
 
 * Are you not,' he says, * returning to the point 
 we discussed a short time ago in regard to Poetry ? 
 In gardens, as in literature, there may be too 
 solicitous finish, or too much carelessness ; and in 
 an age that inclines perhaps overmuch to the 
 former in verse, one may reasonably expect to 
 find the same bias in gardening. Should we not 
 have a care lest, in both cases, craft should take 
 the place of true Art ? ' 
 
 * And this garden ? ' says Lamia, stealing close 
 to him, and with voice, smile, and intonation, 
 leaving him, or any one for that matter, no choice 
 but to reply assentingly : * What, in literature, 
 does the garden that we love resemble ? ' 
 
 * Would it be, Lamia, think you, As You 
 Like It r 
 
 She clapped her hands. ' O, yes ; and you 
 
 shall be the Duke, if I may be ' She paused, 
 
 as if suddenly embarrassed. 
 
 * What you are,' said the Poet, exchanging
 
 26 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 sweet words with her, as usual, ' a compound of 
 Rosalind and Celia.' 
 
 * Am I to be nothing in this literary fantasy of 
 a garden ? ' I pleaded. 
 
 ' You ! ' exclaimed Lamia. * Obviously, you 
 are Jaques, moralising and " full of matter " ; or 
 perhaps the well-known " fool i' the forest." ' 
 
 * And Veronica ? ' 
 
 ' Veronica is the intelligent audience, dealing 
 out justice to us, " merely players," yet at the 
 same time reminding me of a line traditionally 
 attributed to the author of As Tou Like It, though 
 not to be found in any of his works : 
 
 We are all both actors and spectators too.' 
 
 'And attributed to him,' said the Poet, 'I 
 doubt not, correctly ; for he, more than any other 
 man that ever lived, is master of apt, illustrative 
 expression, by which we recognise him at once.' 
 
 Thus we fleet away the time, in the garden 
 that we love, contributing nothing to the excite- 
 ment, but, I am generously assured, occasionally 
 to the delectation of the time, and feeling that 
 this life of ours, exempt from public haunt, is 
 more sweet than that of painted pomp, and quite 
 as profitable to ourselves and others as more 
 elaborate modes of existence.
 
 II 
 
 Michaelmas. * Need I deny it ? ' said the Poet. 
 
 The impeachment was not a very serious one ; 
 for Veronica had only been saying that there were 
 days when he seemed utterly incapable of sitting 
 still, though supposed to be at what is ambiguously 
 called work. It hardly can be necessary to say 
 that the morning -room, in which we usually 
 forgather of an evening, and which, described 
 when I told of the modest addition to our home, 
 has proved such an adornment to it, has been 
 allotted to the Poet, for whom Veronica, more 
 flattering in deeds than words, apparently thinks 
 nothing too good. It is enlivened by the morning 
 sun, and one has only to open the door and 
 traverse a short passage, to find oneself in the 
 Garden, on a flower-crowned brick path, up and 
 down which one may pace or meditate with undis- 
 turbed will. But, as Veronica had been saying, 
 
 27
 
 28 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 there are days when this convenient if limited 
 territory does not satisfy him, but he is out and 
 about in an erratic and unaccountable manner. 
 
 * Need I deny it ? ' he pleaded. ' There is no 
 inevitable connection between the goodness or 
 badness of work, and the pains or pleasure a man 
 takes in doing it. The aphorism * c Genius is 
 patience," was originally coined by Buffon, and 
 not by any of the various persons to whom, in 
 these inaccurate days, it is from time to time 
 ascribed ; and Buffon was dozing somewhat, I 
 think, when he said it. Would it not be nearer 
 the truth, but still not the whole truth, to say that 
 Genius is a mixture of impatience and patience ? 
 But all the impatience and patience in the world 
 will not produce works of Genius, if the workers 
 be not themselves endowed at birth with that 
 sovran gift. Most of us are wanting in patience, 
 and at times have impatience enough to subdue all 
 difficulties, if that quality had in itself any such 
 power, which, alas, it has not. One keeps burst- 
 ing into the Garden, as you say, because there are 
 moments when one cannot sit still. As long as 
 one has freedom to move, and is seized of an idea, 
 one feels as though one had dominion over all the 
 kingdoms of earth and air, and no resistance was
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 29 
 
 offered to utterance and imagination uncontrolled. 
 One sits down and suddenly one finds oneself the 
 mere satrap of a narrow and recalcitrant province. 
 If impelled to write musically one would fall 
 a-mumbling were one to be at rest, and subside 
 into the dreariest prose. The result in one's own 
 case may be but indifferent ; but such is the 
 operation. Do the judges absolve me ? ' 
 
 ' You leave the Court,' said Veronica, * with no 
 stain on your character ; and, so long as you don't 
 break one of my Chippendale chairs, or upset and 
 chip one of my old flower-glasses, you may stam- 
 pede, my dear, at your end of the house as often 
 and long as you like.' 
 
 ' But,' added Lamia for Veronica had left us 
 to look after our creature comforts elsewhere 
 * the Court thinks it only right to assign you some 
 little compensation for the stigma under which you 
 have been lying. It is only by some such process 
 as you have described that any work of art, whether 
 in literature, painting, or music, is imbued with 
 true charm.' 
 
 ' Probably,' he replied. ' Only remember what 
 I said, that it does not necessarily impart it to 
 them.' 
 
 ' But tell me,' said Lamia, ' is it easy, indeed is
 
 30 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 it possible, to say unerringly if a work possesses 
 true charm ? ' 
 
 ' Apparently not,' he answered ; { for though 
 there is such a thing as real charm, there is such 
 another as pseudo-charm ; in a word, the original 
 and a copy; and I observe that copies impose 
 themselves upon a good many supposed experts. 
 A few years ago there was a lively controversy in 
 art circles whether a certain picture, bequeathed by 
 Signor Morelli to Madame Minghetti, widow of 
 the one-time Italian Prime Minister, and alleged 
 to be by Leonardo da Vinci, was an original pic- 
 ture by that supreme painter, a copy, or the work 
 of some other hand. Most experts maintained it 
 was the first ; and, as one of these happened to be 
 a friend of my own, I asked for his opinion, since 
 doubts, by no means ill supported, were thrown 
 on its genuineness. He replied that he would 
 pledge his professional reputation as to its being 
 a genuine Leonardo. "As you know," he said, 
 " the picture has gone to America ; but I have a 
 large and admirable photograph of it, which I will 
 show you." He drew this from a portfolio, and 
 placed it on his easel. Instantaneously I said to 
 myself, " That is not by Leonardo," but I was not 
 so presumptuous as to utter that conclusion aloud.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 31 
 
 Very shortly, a man came forward and said, " / 
 painted that picture," and proved the truth of his 
 assertion beyond power of contradiction. I am no 
 expert in the judging of pictures, or probably I 
 should have been just as much mistaken as my 
 experienced and accomplished friend. The actual 
 painter was a consummate master of technical 
 craft, and, after reading the theory propounded by 
 my friend and others, that the surest way to test 
 the genuineness of a picture is to observe some 
 inevitable detail, such as the contour of the ears or 
 the size and shape of the finger-nails, and having 
 most carefully studied the workmanship and, if 
 one may say so, the unconscious tricks of Leonardo, 
 he had reproduced these with the utmost accuracy. 
 A thoroughly expert draughtsman and colourist, 
 he had thus imposed on other experts, but not on 
 those ignorant of technique in painting, yet loving 
 pictures and not insensible to their charm, and 
 what the Italians call the non so che that constitutes 
 charm. This is rather a long disquisition, Lamia, 
 but you provoked it.' 
 
 * And I am glad I did, and I want you to 
 answer yet another question. Can similar mistakes 
 be made concerning books, and charm in them ? ' 
 
 ' Undoubtedly,' he replied ; ' and, in so far as
 
 32 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 one may trust one's own judgment, they are being 
 constantly made by the professed experts, and for 
 the same reason. It is not often that they fail to 
 perceive charm when it is really there ; but they 
 ever and again ascribe it to pages whose writers, 
 exceedingly clever persons, have more or less 
 caught the trick, as the phrase is, of the real 
 charmers.' 
 
 * But how,' asked Lamia, ' is one to discriminate 
 between the two ? ' 
 
 ' One cannot, so far as demonstration and the 
 convincing of others is concerned ; for, if they do 
 not of themselves perceive the difference, there is 
 no way of communicating it to them. One can 
 do it only for oneself. To feel real charm and 
 distinguish it from deliberate imitation, depends on 
 the power of instinctive appreciation. It is one of 
 those intuitions that cannot be argued about.' 
 
 * Has real charm,' I asked, ' some one quality 
 or characteristic by which we may recognise its 
 presence or its absence ? ' 
 
 'I think so,' he replied. 'The quality is un- 
 consciousness, and charm appertains to the essence 
 of the person or thing endowed with it. It 
 cannot be acquired, it cannot be got rid of, and 
 its results are produced without effort, since
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 33 
 
 the person who has it cannot help producing 
 them.' 
 
 * But surely,' I said, ' there must be effort in the 
 production of every work of art, whether it be a 
 poem, a picture, or a symphony.' 
 
 * Unquestionably ; but the charm in it is not 
 produced by effort. Intention, technique, craft, 
 must contribute to the production of such works ; 
 but that which makes them charming, if they are 
 so, is something quite apart from these. Pope, 
 for instance, is a great writer, and a considerable 
 poet, and abounds in intention, craft, and tech- 
 nique ; but he rarely, if ever, has charm. He 
 did not have it in himself, and therefore could not 
 radiate it. Spenser is a supreme instance of charm 
 as a poet. Apparently, he could not help being 
 charming, save where the theme forbade the 
 exhibition of it ; and even this is very rare with 
 him. Mozart is a supreme instance of it in 
 music ; and I should be disposed to say Raphael 
 is in painting.' 
 
 Both Lamia and I seemed to be in an unusually 
 argumentative mood, and went on, pressing the 
 Poet very hard. 
 
 ' I know,' said Lamia, ' it is approaching rank 
 blasphemy to ask the question I am going to put. 
 
 D
 
 34 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 But has the Garden that we love no real charm ? 
 It certainly has been produced with no little effort.' 
 
 ' I think, Lamia, I can elude, while answering 
 you. For me, at least, the Garden that we love 
 does possess charm, but not arising from anything 
 we have done to it. Save for its native position 
 and accidents, which we did not create, it would 
 not be charming, though it might still be beautiful. 
 The magnificent timber that is not in it but near 
 it, the park in front of it, the park behind it, the 
 architecture of the old Manor House, the majestic 
 guardianship of the secular oak, its facing south- 
 east these, and other conditions we did not 
 create, render it charming ; and, if I may say so, 
 it is yet more charming when you are in it.' 
 
 I confess I began to think there must be some- 
 thing sophistical, not to say unsound, in the 
 argument, when there was resorted to something 
 very like bribery and corruption to enforce it. 
 But that suspicion, perhaps naturally, did not strike 
 Lamia, who observed 
 
 ' I allow,' she said, * I rarely make an effort, 
 but I know a good many people who never do so, 
 yet are very much the reverse of charming. But, 
 though I too feel the charm of the Garden that 
 we' love, I certainly am not aware of adding to it.'
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 35 
 
 * If you were/ said the Poet, taking advantage 
 of her inadvertence, ' you would cease to be charm- 
 ing. Women,' he went on, ' are more frequently 
 charming than men, because they are less self- 
 conscious. Look at flowers, also. There is not 
 a rose in all the garden, however beautiful, delicate, 
 wonderfully complex, it may be, that is as charm- 
 ing as the wild-rose in the hedge-row. Is not the 
 truth this, that the word charm is used too in- 
 discriminately, and indeed, by some people, at 
 every turn, and of everything ? Moreover, in 
 poetry at least, it is a quality that of late years has 
 come to be over-estimated, relatively to other 
 qualities. There is often a certain effeminate 
 sensuousness in charm, that is very attractive to 
 the present generation, which overlooks other 
 elements in art of equal, probably of yet greater, 
 importance. The Earthly Paradise is more charm- 
 ing, in the proper sense of the word, than Paradise 
 Lost. Yet will any one say it is as great ? Does 
 it not, in comparison, on the score of greatness, 
 sink into insignificance ? So you see, Lamia, one 
 tries to keep the balance even. As I have granted, 
 women are more charming than men ; but I will 
 venture to add, men, that is to say some men, are 
 greater than any women.'
 
 36 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 * Womanly women,' said Lamia, ' will gladly 
 accord to man superiority in that respect, so they 
 be left superior in the other. I would sooner be 
 a wild-rose than win battles or electrify Senates. 
 All the same one is glad there are human beings 
 who can electrify Senates and win battles, and we 
 should sorely miss them if they did not exist.' 
 
 ' The distinction,' said the Poet, ' seems to me 
 a true and universal one. Nor does one see suffi- 
 cient reason, despite the protests of an active but 
 small minority, to suppose that it will not be a 
 permanent one. Look at most women, when 
 their faces are in repose. What are they doing ? 
 They are dreaming. Look at men. They are 
 thinking.' 
 
 ' Unless,' observed Lamia, ' the men happen to 
 be poets. Then they are doing both.' 
 
 * Q.E.D.,' I murmured sardonically, under my 
 breath. 
 
 The foregoing conversation had not been wholly 
 uninteresting to me. But when it ended in the 
 usual battledore and shuttlecock game of recip- 
 rocated sweetnesses, I wandered round the garden 
 for neutral company, and fell to wondering 
 whether it is more attractive in late spring or in 
 the early days of autumn. I saw it affirmed in
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 37 
 
 print the other day that the writers who say a 
 beautiful flower-garden can be had for eight, and 
 sometimes for nine, months in the year, are mis- 
 leading people. I can only reply that the person 
 who made that statement has but an imperfect 
 acquaintance with gardening and its possibilities. 
 Should there come a heavy and continuous fall of 
 snow at the beginning of March, and should it lie 
 for the whole of that month, then I grant the 
 ordinary course of nature has been for once in- 
 terrupted. But when, in the south or west of 
 England, does that happen ? I have known some- 
 thing like it, but only something like it, occur just 
 once in a now pretty long experience. For the 
 rest, I am prepared not only to do battle for the 
 ' eight or nine months ' period, but to go still 
 farther, and to plead that no month in ^ the year 
 is out of doors wholly flowerless, at least, in the 
 south, south-east, south-west, and west of England. 
 I speak only of what I know, and what the Garden 
 That I Love has taught me. New Year's Day, 
 let us say, has come and gone, and January is 
 moving slowly on. Choose but the aspect aright, 
 and prepare the soil with due knowledge, and 
 what is there to prevent the winter-aconites from 
 greeting the New Year, and accompanying it till
 
 38 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 January be spent ? Do not suppose this will 
 infallibly happen the very first January after you 
 put the bulbs into the ground, though even then 
 it may. You must not, however, count on it. 
 But the year after that, and for every succeeding 
 January, the winter-aconites will illuminate with 
 their golden cressets the spot where you have 
 placed them. We have two little nooks for them 
 immediately on either side of the entrance -door 
 that looks south-east, and they never fail to come 
 forth and show themselves in the very first month 
 of the year, signalling to their brethren in the turf 
 under the old oak to be up and about, and not 
 long laggard after these early risers. The most 
 effective clump of them, no doubt, is in a small 
 round open bed under a tulip -tree, as yet of 
 moderate dimensions, though it has already begun 
 to flower in the late summer. But these winter 
 aconites open a little later, by reason of the partial 
 shade above them given by the pretty thick 
 branches of the tulip-tree, even when still bare of 
 leaves. That little round space serves a double 
 purpose ; for, while the winter -aconites in full 
 flower there cover the whole of it, below them 
 and out of sight are colchicum bulbs, which the 
 ignorant call winter-crocuses, given me many years
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 39 
 
 ago by the wife of a famous Field-Marshal and a 
 woman of exquisite taste. They are of the pale 
 lavender colour, much more rare and difficult to 
 get than the larger, deep-coloured ones, which we 
 also have ; and when their foliage fades, and can 
 be carefully cut or pulled away, up come, to replace 
 them, the strong, vigorous leaves of the Colchicum. 
 But only the leaves ; which in summer themselves 
 wax wilted and fade, and then leafless flowers of 
 the most delicate colour and dainty beauty come 
 up, and look like Fairyland under the then lavishly 
 furnished tulip-tree. And does the horticultural 
 sceptic I refer to suppose it is impossible to coax 
 yellow crocuses for the yellow ones are the 
 hardiest to face the perils of the early days of 
 the year, or to get snowdrops to do the same, 
 without any coaxing at all ? And the primrose ? 
 I do not speak of garden primulas, but of the wild 
 and simple native of the woodlands. Is it beneath 
 one's notice, and undeserving of a place in the 
 garden? In the one we love there is always a 
 place allotted to it, and more than one place ; and 
 it must be a very peculiar January, one deep in 
 snow, or hard frost-bound, for a certain number 
 of these unaffected flowers not to be awake and 
 up somewhere then. I will not engage that on
 
 40 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 your rockery you shall have Cyclamen coum in 
 bloom, but you may, and with it the small, 
 modest, but clustering and effective flowers of 
 the Potentilla. 
 
 But, like a prudent general, I keep my best 
 and bravest battalion for the final charge ; and I 
 ask this sceptic of gardens whether he has ever 
 seen the Iris stylosa ? I saw them first in a but- 
 little-cared-for garden at Bordighera pretty long 
 ago, and I stood wondering under the spell of 
 enchantment. I brought some home with me, or, 
 rather, had them sent to me late in the spring 
 when they had finished flowering, and for the first 
 two years made a deplorable misuse of them. 
 They showed ample leafage, but did not flower ; 
 and then it struck me that they had not been 
 accustomed to high living, and I had been over- 
 feeding them, and the muzzle must be put on by 
 giving them the leanest of fare. In plain words, 
 the soil was much too rich for them. I took 
 them up, broke them into small pieces, and planted 
 them in a sheltered yet sunny position, and in a 
 mass of rubble mixed with light poor soil. Since 
 then they have produced an uninterrupted suc- 
 cession of flowers from the beginning of December 
 till the coming of the first swallow. Veronica
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 41 
 
 delights in them, and some are always taken to 
 her boudoir, where freesias also are welcome, but 
 from which flowers of strong perfume are rigidly 
 excluded. 
 
 But this is not winter, whose contribution to 
 the ' nine months in the year ' I think I have 
 established; nor yet spring, whose floral reputa- 
 tion needs no defending, for no one would dream 
 of assailing it. We are, at the time at which I 
 wrote, at the parting of the ways between a pro- 
 digious summer and an equally splendid but less 
 ostentatious autumn ; or, to put it differently, 
 October is protecting the rear of departing summer. 
 I cannot help a little self-complacency just now, 
 since the garden has this year had a conspicuous 
 triumph. The unbroken drought of July and 
 August had dealt irreparable desolation in every 
 other garden I have seen or heard of; and the 
 ruin was completed by the hurricane of wind that 
 accompanied the advent of showers, even then not 
 too bountiful. Never before has the Garden That 
 I Love been in greater beauty. There is a vacuum, 
 a failure, nowhere ; and even Veronica is unre- 
 served in her admiration. She was away during 
 August, and returned only in the early days of 
 September. I had abstained from all report of its
 
 42 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 condition, and my silence led her to conclude, not 
 that no news was good news, but very bad news 
 indeed. In order to keep up the comedy, I 
 arranged that on her return she should enter from 
 the lane, in order that what there was to show 
 should burst upon her nearly all at once. 
 
 * I suppose,' she said, ' the Garden is a wreck, 
 like all that I have seen elsewhere.' 
 
 * It has been a sadly trying time,' I replied 
 evasively. 
 
 In another moment we emerged from the 
 plantation near the well, and suddenly the Garden 
 was in sight. She stopped full short, as the phrase 
 is, held up both hands, and exclaimed 
 
 'Oh!' 
 
 That was all, but how much it was, and one 
 was more than rewarded for all one had done to 
 baffle the long-continued drought. Let me say 
 once more that due digging and manuring in May 
 ought to furnish a garden with protection against 
 Fate in any ordinary year. But I had misgivings 
 that this was going to be an extraordinary one ; 
 and as, two winters ago, we made, under the old 
 Manor Pound, a good large tank to receive the 
 rain-water from all the guttering round the old 
 red-roofed farm buildings still remaining near the
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 43 
 
 house, including those of the house itself, there 
 was an ample supply at the beginning of June. 
 Not to everything, but only to beds and borders 
 stocked with things planted in them at the end of 
 May, we began at once applying rain-water after 
 the sun had gone off them. Many persons will 
 assert that watering does no good, and sometimes 
 does serious hurt. But that depends on the nature 
 of the water. If the water be hard, or, indeed, 
 other than bona-fide rain-water, that would be so ; 
 for, of course, watering has a tendency to bring 
 roots and rootlets to the surface in expectation of 
 what they like so much ; and the process, once 
 started, must be persisted in. Persist we did ; 
 and we followed up the watering with periodical 
 hoeing. By the end of the month everything 
 looked wonderfully forward, and then the nine 
 weeks' drought began. Confident in the resources 
 of the tank, we continued our evening labours with 
 excellent effect. But, by the middle of August, 
 the gardener said the tank was very low. In a 
 few more days it was empty, and the drought and 
 sun -heat were more pitiless than ever. In our 
 resolve not to be beaten there was no slackening ; 
 and though our modest resources can produce only 
 hand water-barrels, these were trundled down to
 
 44 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 the river and back for three or four hours every 
 day. I felt, however, that, though no complaint 
 had been uttered, the * grind ' was too much in 
 such weather, and so reverted to another device. 
 There is another tank, which Cowper, perhaps, 
 who introduces into his verse such a realistic line 
 as ' The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,' would 
 have described more minutely, but of which I will 
 content myself with saying that it yielded some 
 three to four hundred gallons a day of soft, but 
 not quite so savoury, a liquid. Needs must when 
 ' the devil of a drought ' drives ; and, as Veronica 
 and Lamia were absent, it did not much matter. 
 
 After three days, clouds began to muster on 
 the horizon ; rumblings were heard in the distance, 
 and, finally, down came the rain. The situation, 
 as they say, had been saved. But that represents 
 very inadequately what had happened. Coming 
 on the top you see, I cannot help adopting the 
 language of the grateful and triumphant gardener 
 and his help of the use of the unsavoury tank, 
 the rain put the finishing touch to our efforts, and 
 produced the effect that caused Veronica to halt 
 in astonishment, and exclaim 
 
 'Oh!' 
 
 One of the results has been that everything is
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 45 
 
 prodigiously tall. The dahlias are nine, the sun- 
 flowers thirteen, feet high, even Montbretia close 
 on four, and Salvia farinacea, which most persons 
 take for tall lavender, fully five feet high. Other 
 things, herbaceous, biennial, and annual, have shot 
 upward in like proportion. But, just as the 
 moralising Watts said, ' The mind's the measure 
 of the man,' so the flowering of plants is the final 
 standard of their worth and loveliness ; and they 
 are all not only divinely tall, but most divinely 
 efflorescent. I could not resist feeling, as I walked 
 round them to-day, that beds, and borders, and 
 groups, had projected a private flower-show of 
 their own, and are now ' showing ' against each 
 other. Were I the prize-giver, I should be per- 
 plexed to know to which to assign it. Poet's 
 Corner another, if you remember, of Veronica's 
 christenings is a garden in itself. The variegated 
 maize, the daturas, and the dark castor-oil plant, 
 seem to have entered into an almost fraudulent 
 conspiracy to deceive the unwary, the white bells 
 of the datura appearing to belong to all three, 
 so cunningly have they mingled with each other. 
 Yet, if I were compelled to come to a decision, I 
 almost think that I should assign the gold medal 
 to the oval bed seen through the leafy branches
 
 46 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of the Hungarian lime, which is at once simple 
 and imposing. So simple is it, that its composi- 
 tion is soon told. In the centre are tall tropical- 
 looking cannas, and round them variegated maize, 
 bronze castor -oil, and the dwarfer dark -leafed 
 cannas. Outside these, again, is Montbretia> in 
 splendid flower, and an edging of China -aster 
 sinensis. Yet when I wander off in another 
 direction, and come upon the Lobelia cardinalis, 
 the Calceolaria ampkxicaulis, and the fibrous- 
 rooted begonias, in chromatic combination, I feel 
 that I have been unjust, after all, and that here 
 the first prize should have been adjudged. 
 
 How much longer will it last ? Like the 
 poppies, of whom it has been written 
 
 They flaunt like glory, and fade as fast, 
 
 so over all this loveliness stretches the lengthening 
 shadow of the declining year ; and I could not 
 but repeat to myself the stanza 
 
 She wore the silent plaintive grace 
 Of autumn just before its close, 
 
 And, on her fair but fading face, 
 The pathos of November rose. 
 
 We were sitting in the lime parlour, the name 
 given to it by Veronica, who much affects the
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 47 
 
 spot, roofed by the leafy dome of the weeping 
 Hungarian lime, which every other year needs to 
 have its ever-encroaching territory recognised and 
 marked out afresh by unbarked timber pillars or 
 supports. What led up to the following conver- 
 sation I quite forget ; but it began by the Poet 
 observing 
 
 'In no community is literature so little rever- 
 enced, and are men-of-letters so little regarded, as 
 in England. I am by no means sure this is a 
 disadvantage to the latter ; indeed, I am disposed, 
 on the whole, to think it is for their good. But 
 the fact is certain, and to the nation at large it can 
 hardly fail to be injurious.' 
 
 * What is the cause ? ' asked Lamia. 
 
 * Is it not the practical character of our race ? ' 
 I suggested. ' Our countrymen are moved to 
 admiration only by actual, patent, and resounding 
 success ; but the best literature is not resounding, 
 and the most . self-respecting men-of-letters, as a 
 rule, lead retired lives.' 
 
 * But how about English women ? ' asked 
 Veronica. 
 
 * I am afraid,' answered the Poet, * that as 
 regards women also, the phenomenon holds equally 
 good. Privately, and in their hearts, I daresay
 
 48 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 they have a warm admiration for superior talent 
 of every kind, and a still warmer for real genius. 
 But probably men cherish the same sentiment 
 privately. In France, in Italy, even in Germany, 
 though perhaps at present in a waning degree, 
 admiration is openly and enthusiastically expressed.' 
 
 * Is what you have said/ asked Lamia, ' equally 
 true of painting and music in this country ? ' 
 
 ' Not to the same extent, by any means ; and 
 for the reason I have already suggested. Painters 
 exhibit their pictures, and the compositions of 
 musicians are heard^ and heard frequently ; so 
 that both may have that practical and patent 
 success I spoke of. Moreover, since painters can 
 paint the portraits of kings, princes, and other 
 eminent persons, and thus minister to the sense of 
 self-importance, rich men can buy, and so glorify 
 themselves by the purchase and monopoly of the 
 pictures, and practical and patent success is thus 
 achieved. But I still doubt whether their patrons 
 have a genuine reverence for them. They regard 
 them rather as a flattering form of usefulness.' 
 
 ' Has the example,' said Veronica, ' thus set in 
 the highest quarters, anything to do with the 
 absence of reverence on the part of the nation 
 generally ? '
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 49 
 
 ' I rather think so. We are an aristocratic, 
 I use the word in its conventional, not in its 
 proper sense, some would say a snobbish people, 
 and so imitate our so-called betters, who, in many 
 respects, are often our inferiors.' 
 
 * But may we go back,' said Lamia, * to the 
 woman's share in the question ? I think some of 
 us have a profound reverence, which we scarcely 
 conceal, for superior mental gifts.' 
 
 * If by " some of us," ' said the Poet, smiling, 
 * you mean, dear, yourself, it is perfectly true. I 
 am well aware that, if you were allowed, you would 
 go careering through the land on a motor-car, 
 disfiguring the road with leaflets on the unequalled 
 claims to universal admiration and reverence of 
 certain obscure persons. But I do not think your 
 journey would be a very successful one ; certainly 
 not as much so as if you distributed leaflets on 
 a new soap or a novel form of underclothing ; 
 and, in all probability, you would end by being 
 summoned for forgetting, in your mistaken enthu- 
 siasm, the number of miles an hour at which one 
 is by law permitted to raise dust anything rather 
 than Olympian. To be allowed to do that, you 
 must drive a motor-car in rivalry with other 
 motor-cars, in order to have the practical and 
 
 E
 
 50 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 patent success of placing them on the market, and 
 making them appear to have the largest and longest 
 circulation in the world.' 
 
 * Alas ! ' said Lamia, with a profound sigh, ' it 
 is so. What is one to do ? ' 
 
 ' Nothing,' he replied, quite cheerfully. * But 
 there are many things worth noting, for which 
 there is no remedy. Indeed, the enduring evils, 
 rather than the passing ones, it is, that are the 
 most interesting.' 
 
 * Is he not provoking,' said Veronica, * with his 
 philosophic indifference, or, still worse, his amused 
 resignation to what is both mischievous and unfair ? ' 
 
 ' Quite incorrigible,' said Lamia. ' But I should 
 like to add to what has been said, that, whereas in 
 France and Germany men of genius have almost 
 always had their Egerias, who did not console 
 and encourage them surreptitiously at midnight, 
 but aided and abetted them in the full glare of 
 day, and have survived in story to share their 
 fame, in England the poor Numas endowed by 
 Heaven with superior gifts have rarely had such 
 companions, or, if they had them, consoler and 
 consoled alike have taken pains to hide, both 
 in their life and afterward, any such disgraceful 
 circumstance.'
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 51 
 
 * Is it,' I asked, because, as I heard a Hun- 
 garian lady assert the other day, ' that, in respect 
 of the relations of the sexes, Englishmen, though 
 not all of them, are the only gentlemen in 
 Europe ? ' 
 
 ' I suspect,' the Poet replied, ' there is some 
 truth in that. Frenchmen openly boast of what 
 an Englishman would feel bound to treat as strictly 
 private and confidential ; and French and German 
 ladies have paraded and published stories of 
 feminine generosity which an Englishwoman would 
 have buried in her heart. When Merimee pub- 
 lished his Lettres a une Inconnue^ French people 
 asked, why this anonymity? The mystery was 
 explained by the circumstance that the Inconnue 
 was an Englishwoman. I was reading the other 
 day an article in the leading French Review on 
 the letters written to and by Frau Wesendonk, 
 and the writer fell into raptures over the story 
 they disclosed. For the lady I could not repress 
 my sympathy, pity, and admiration ; but I was 
 inspired with deep dislike for everything in Wagner 
 except his genius. The " long disease, my life " 
 of Pope was alleviated by the kindness of two old 
 maids, but treated very differently by Lady Mary 
 Wortley Montagu when Pope would fain have
 
 52 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 played the part of Abelard to Eloisa ; and the 
 infirmities of Cowper were mitigated by the tender 
 domestic attention of Lady Austen and Mrs. 
 Unwin. But Chaucer, but Spenser, but Shake- 
 speare, but Milton, but Dryden who was their 
 Egeria, if they had one, or who were the sensitive, 
 unselfish beings that stimulated their genius, and 
 softened their sorrows ? We can hardly believe 
 they were without such. Modern biographers 
 have striven to discover that secret ; for, in these 
 days, as another poet concerning whom no such 
 association has been disclosed, has said, " the 
 many-headed beast must know." But they have 
 groped and ferreted in vain ; and, despite Shake- 
 speare's sonnets, " the dark woman " is still 
 shrouded in darkness, his youthful courtship has 
 only furnished doubts as to who really was his 
 wife, and the gropers have not been able to make 
 anything out of the bequest of his bedstead to his 
 widow beyond the fact that his bedstead it was, 
 and that it was left to her.' 
 
 'But we have changed all that,' I observed, 
 * in these admirably progressive days ; and the 
 loves of Byron, Burns, Shelley, and Keats, have 
 become the property of the whole world.' 
 
 ' That is so,' said the Poet ; ' but it has scarcely
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 53 
 
 been to their serious advantage ; and even they 
 were mild offenders, compared with, say, Chateau- 
 briand, who, not content with pluming himself in 
 his lifetime on what the French nation character- 
 istically call bonnes fortunes, must needs publish 
 posthumous memoirs, to perpetuate his role of 
 conquering hero. As in his case, if in a minor 
 degree, such questionable notoriety for details of 
 incidents of private life have obtained a wider 
 vogue for the writings of the English poets I have 
 just mentioned. But they scarcely needed this 
 vulgar form of advertisement, and they certainly 
 do not stand higher in the esteem of their country- 
 men in consequence.' 
 
 ' But,' said Lamia pleadingly, ' you do not, do 
 you, condemn the French women of intellectual 
 distinction of the eighteenth century, whose names 
 are permanently associated with men to whose 
 mental development their sympathy and encourage- 
 ment seem to have acted as a stimulus and an 
 encouragement ? ' 
 
 ' Far from it, Lamia. But, in the cases to 
 which you refer intellectual sympathy occupies the 
 foreground, and was, and will remain, an honour 
 to both. In this respect, the biographies and 
 diaries of English men-of-letters and their feminine
 
 54 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 auxiliaries are much behindhand ; but, whether 
 because there was little or nothing of the kind to 
 tell, or of the incurable shyness and reserve of the 
 English nature, who shall say ? We are the only 
 people in the world who strive to seem more stupid 
 and less interesting than we really are.' 
 
 ' I was wanting,' said Lamia, * to arrive at that 
 conclusion. If a man deviates in ever so slight 
 a degree from reserve, he runs the risk of being 
 regarded as an egotist. If he deviates from it still 
 more he is looked upon as a " bounder." 
 
 ' And quite right too,' said Veronica. * Men 
 ought to be able to fight their own battles, shape 
 their own career, and achieve their purpose, without 
 sympathy. If they fail, then I daresay there will 
 always be a little womanly consolation in reserve 
 for them somewhere.' 
 
 * But how about the sympathetic assistance given 
 by men to intellectual women ? ' asked Lamia. 
 
 * Is not that easily answered ? ' said the Poet. 
 ' Women are interested in men, men are interested 
 in themselves.' 
 
 * How serious we all are to-day ! ' said Lamia, 
 * and I feel the fault is mine. Let me try to repair 
 it by reading to you the following lines I found 
 lying about, and that might have been written
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 55 
 
 in prophetic anticipation of what we have been 
 saying.' 
 
 We all ' struck the proper attitude ' to hear 
 the verses to which Lamia's voice seemed to give 
 at least a quiet movement of melody. 
 
 A WOMAN'S AVOWAL 
 
 Let others, be there such, aspire 
 
 To a resounding life, 
 Leaving unfed the household fire 
 
 For heat of public strife, 
 I am content, to choose though free, 
 
 In no such paths to roam, 
 And only unheard helpmate be 
 
 To him who guards my home. 
 
 But I can nerve him for the fray 
 
 When duty needs his arm, 
 Cheering him onward day by day 
 
 With love's attendant charm. 
 And when he may contend no more, 
 
 After long strenuous years, 
 I may his waning strength restore 
 
 With tenderness and tears. 
 
 HI 
 
 His closing days will walk with mine 
 
 Down age's gentle slope, 
 The shadow of that dear decline 
 
 Brightened by lengthening hope.
 
 56 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 And should he hence the first depart, 
 
 As, for his sake, I crave, 
 I shall embalm him in my heart, 
 
 And sanctify his grave. 
 
 I half feared her voice, which audibly trembled, 
 would not serve her to the end. But it held out 
 bravely, though through its silvery tone there 
 seemed to sound the minor of suppressed tears. 
 The Poet stroked her hand ; Veronica put her arm 
 round her ; and thus I left them, strange happy 
 trinity, to meditate once more in the unpolemical 
 beauty of the Garden That I Love.
 
 Ill 
 
 February 28. * They are out ! They're all 
 out!' 
 
 'What? Which? Where?' 
 
 It was Lamia who had come running in, to 
 announce the above somewhat vague tidings ; 
 and, among us, we fired off those more precise 
 inquiries. 
 
 * Why, the bees, of course, and, with them, 
 two sulphur butterflies.' 
 
 Sure enough, out they were for the first time 
 this year, making such music as never was, on the 
 only instruments as yet accessible ,to their delicate 
 touch. It has been a long, lingering winter, and, 
 though it is the last day of February, one has to 
 go hunting in the warmest and most sheltered 
 nooks, to discern here and there a few short- 
 stalked primroses. But the wind has veered to 
 the sanguine south ; the sun has routed every 
 
 57
 
 58 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 cloud from the sky; and the winter -aconites, 
 hitherto offering only button-shaped buds to the 
 view, have opened wide their eyes ; and it is 
 among them that the bees, announced by Lamia, 
 are so busily buzzing. Need I say that we all 
 sallied out to behold this first indication, and hear 
 the first notes, of adumbrated Spring ? 
 
 We are not bee-keepers, for the bees keep 
 themselves, and have a vast establishment deep 
 under the rafters of one of the farm-yard sheds, 
 which were fully described when first eheu 
 fugaces I I see it was thirteen years ago one 
 began to coo like a self-complacent cushat, as 
 Lamia puts it, over the garden that I love. 
 Veronica occasionally betrays her housekeeping 
 propensities by asking if we male creatures are 
 not going to do something towards bringing in 
 a portion at least of the honey there must lurk in 
 the invisible home of the industrious community. 
 But we give her no encouragement, and again 
 plead that this is Liberty Hall, where even bees 
 are to be allowed to work undisturbed, at their 
 own sweet will. 
 
 * They are repaying us now,' says Lamia, ' for 
 our forbearance. Listen to them as they gather 
 the pollen.'
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 59 
 
 A lingering Winter and a tardy Spring are 
 what we always should like in this part of the 
 world. Last year the weather made quite different 
 arrangements, and the consequence was that plums, 
 pears, and even apples fell helpless victims to the 
 topsy-turvydom of nature and the seasons. Now 
 the promise of the three, so far as one yet can 
 judge, is magnificent, and one already, in fancy, 
 sees purple clusters of early prolific plums thicker 
 than leaves on south wall branches, and Lamia 
 declares she can already taste the sharp sub-flavour 
 of the ' councillors of the court,' and the luscious 
 sweetness of the ever-popular ' good Christians.' 
 
 ' You will know more about that,' says warier 
 Veronica, ' when the young May moon has ceased 
 shining. Meanwhile, cloy your appetite with bare 
 imagination of a feast.' 
 
 March 12. Twelve days have now passed since 
 the foregoing hopeful tidings were announced ; 
 and since then the season has moved on apace 
 without check or hindrance. One can see that 
 everything is astir underground, and many things 
 spreading themselves out above it. The wizard 
 sun has changed the look of the world, especially 
 in the garden, and most of all under that oak 
 which has seen Celt, Roman, Saxon, Norman, and
 
 60 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 our hybridised selves occupy the English land. 
 The same tale can be told of the crocus, and even 
 of the snowdrop, as of the primroses. They have 
 lagged in an unprecedented manner. But the 
 golden colonies under the oak are now all ablaze, 
 our wealth being, as Lamia reminds me the Poet 
 has somewhere ^said, ' not under, but above, the 
 ground.' The white, purple, and lilac ones are 
 slower a'coming ; but here and there they are 
 following suit, and in a day or two will overtake 
 their yellow comrades. By the middle of the 
 month, as we all know for even in this desultory, 
 superficial, tit -bit age, almost everybody knows 
 one or two brief quotations from Shakespeare 
 the daffodils ought to be * taking the winds of 
 March with beauty ' ; but this year they are 
 behindhand in their wooing. It is just as well, 
 for it gives the more modest, if many-coloured, 
 crocuses a fair chance of being appreciated. 
 Nature never intended the two to come together. 
 I wish so many people, and among them those 
 who have the ordering of royal and public gardens, 
 would not plant crocuses in so formal and regular 
 a manner, but imitate the admirable irregularity 
 of the heavens in the ordering and disposition of 
 the stars. I am sure, if you saw them, you would
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 61 
 
 think the crocus patches under the oak have come 
 there of themselves, they have such a haphazard 
 appearance. In beds and borders, I grant you, 
 you may without any reproach, from me at least, 
 plant your crocuses in long uninterrupted lines ; 
 for beds and borders perforce betray the hand and 
 co-operation of man ; and until they are one mass 
 of growth and colour in August and September, 
 and the ground is entirely hidden, it is no good 
 pretending that chance has been your gardener. 
 That is why early Spring is the season for wild 
 gardening. The change from grey to green turf, 
 dappled with daisies after the long sluggish months 
 of winter, suggests the spontaneous lavishness of 
 nature ; and illusion, that happiest and most bene- 
 ficent of all things, is thus produced and prolonged 
 during the burgeoning season. 
 
 But Spring is not here yet, so it is no use pre- 
 tending that it is, though Lamia and the Poet, 
 ever ready to be illusioned by agreeable omens, 
 and always ready to build on them airy structures, 
 compared with which castles in Spain are solid 
 edifices, persuade themselves, and vainly try to 
 persuade Veronica and me, that it is. 
 
 ' You have neither insight nor foresight,' Lamia 
 says to me. * You sometimes assert, in doubtful
 
 62 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 compliment to me, that I have some of Spring's 
 characteristics, of course the most objectionable 
 ones, uncertainty and capriciousness, and that I 
 occasionally resemble it. Let us suppose it is true, 
 and it follows as the day the night what an 
 irrelevant collocation of cause and consequence in 
 our all -wise, but, perhaps because, unscientific, 
 Stratford Common Councillor ! that I must know 
 more about Spring than you do, or, be it reverently 
 said, even Veronica does ; and whatever I know, 
 the Poet knows, only better. Therefore, it is 
 Spring. Listen to the thrushes, unless you have 
 ears and hear not ! They are a little behindhand 
 in beginning their duets, sonatas, and symphonies 
 on their Spring instruments, though March has 
 been drumming in the trees and up the chimney ; 
 but they are audibly tuning up now, adagio adagio, 
 andante, and rondo con moto espressivo, will soon 
 follow.' 
 
 ' Yes,' I said, * even I have observed that the 
 first indications of love-making by them have 
 begun.' 
 
 * Do you mean to hint that I am like them in 
 that also ? On the contrary, I am trying to take 
 a lesson from them in that respect ; being so 
 ignorant of that popular accomplishment. But,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 63 
 
 rather to my perplexity, I observe that, with them, 
 the preliminaries of the Ars Amandi I must ask 
 the Poet, some time when Veronica is not present, 
 if Ovid mentions it in that classical work, Dryden's 
 translation of which I am not allowed so much as 
 to look at, poor little innocent ! strongly resemble 
 the strategy and tactics of war. Look at them 
 now. All the blackbirds say as yet is " Come 
 on ! " and they fight and flutter at each other 
 from dawn to dark.' 
 
 ' Only the males,' I suggest ; * the females are 
 hanging about, and looking on, though seemingly 
 with much impartial sympathy.' 
 
 ' Exactly,' says Lamia ; ' but therein lies my 
 interest, and my desire to be instructed by them. 
 That the eager females, like the tender-hearted 
 matrons egging on the gladiators in the Roman 
 amphitheatre to maul each other, are the instigators 
 of the feathered fight, I cannot doubt, but I want 
 to find out how they do it, so that I may follow 
 suit. Love and war, arma virumque cano, these 
 are the eternal enduring twin ; so that, manlike, 
 you can be sentimental and pugnacious at one and 
 the same time, and we interested but amused 
 observers of your antics when what you are pleased 
 to call the season of love and love-making sets in.'
 
 64 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 * I never said so,' I pleaded ; * I leave that to 
 the Poets.' 
 
 * You had better leave everything to them,' she 
 replied, ' for they know more about everything 
 than you, with your practical common-sense views, 
 are ever likely to know about anything. But, 
 before we quit the subject of the Ars Amatoria^ 
 let me remind you of what a poet, pretty well 
 versed in male ways of love-making, says, and it 
 is no use your protesting against it, for nobody 
 will believe you. 
 
 The bird that sings within the brake, 
 The swan that swims upon the lake, 
 One mate, and one alone, will take, 
 While Man 
 
 Just look at those two thrushes ! Like the two 
 armies in the "Battle of the Huns," painted by Kaul- 
 bach, in the Gallery at Berlin, which, when dark 
 descended on the combat, continued it in the air 
 under the stars, they are not satisfied with pecking 
 and clawing on the ground, but must needs fly 
 upward simultaneously, in order, I suppose, to 
 get, one on the top of the other, and use beak 
 more successfully. How masculine ! But where 
 is the lady ? See ! there she is. She was under 
 the rhododendron bush, waiting to extend her
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 65 
 
 favour to the successful athlete. But I am no 
 wiser than ever, and I fear I must rest satisfied 
 with maiden meditations.' 
 
 'You are so discursive, Lamia, this morning,' 
 I said, ' I am quite unable to follow your reasoning.' 
 
 * Reasoning ! ' she exclaimed. * As though I 
 was ever so foolish as to reason. Of all the 
 passions, reason is the most misleading. Do you 
 want an authority for that statement? Then, 
 here it is : 
 
 Reason, by reason proved unreasonable, 
 Continues reasoning still. 
 
 See, another fight, but this time the combatants 
 are blackbirds. Fighting is only the most con- 
 clusive form of reasoning. And now I want some 
 violets.' 
 
 Need I say that off I went, at once, to bring 
 her some. We have them in myriads just now, 
 but for the most part in frames, though, after a 
 couple of sunny days, there are always some long- 
 stalked, single * Princess of Wales ' in the open. 
 By the time I had accomplished my errand, and 
 returned with a posy of Parma ones for Lamia, 
 the Poet was with her. She held them towards 
 him to smell, and then fastened them just where 
 they ought to have been, on her breast. 
 
 F
 
 66 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' How much sweeter,' said the Poet, ' English 
 violets always seem than Roman ones ; as though 
 they were lineally descended from, and had inherited 
 the qualities of such as have been gathered for 
 hundreds of years by English children in peaceful 
 English lanes, or by English lads and lasses in 
 English gardens, with exchanged blushings, and 
 stammerings, and secluded embraces ; innocent 
 darlings of the Spring in innocent hands from 
 innocent, but somewhat inarticulate hearts. One 
 has gathered many a handful in the Campagna 
 hard by the tomb of Cecilia Metella. But some- 
 how they always seemed to smell of blood and 
 fever ; the successors of those rank with the life- 
 stream of assassinated Emperors and lustful 
 Empresses, or trodden under the hoofs of Goth, 
 Gaul, and Hun.' 
 
 Let no one suppose that because, in the pre- 
 cincts of the garden that we love, cultivated violets 
 abound, we have frames, ' houses,' conservatories, 
 and what not, without number. On the contrary, 
 I have never found any, save ourselves, to under- 
 stand how so relatively lavish a result is produced 
 out-of-doors by such meagre resources in ' glass.' 
 You know the old saying, ' His head will never 
 save his legs ' ; but our head I am too modest
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 67 
 
 to say whose head mostly saves us from much 
 expenditure that is profitless and useless, save to 
 enable self-indulgent gardeners to potter under 
 cover when the weather without is not to their 
 taste. Two diminutive houses, one of them rarely 
 warmed artificially above a temperature needed for 
 keeping out the frost, a few frames and pits, and 
 an absolutely unheated peach -house useful for 
 ' hardening off' things in the Spring, and giving 
 us an ample supply of peaches and nectarines in 
 August, are our only expedients for such success 
 as we have in the garden, and for cultivating the 
 more delicate chrysanthemums, Arum lilies, ' Bride ' 
 gladioli, and such like, to be brought indoors for 
 decoration in December and the two following 
 months. Between two of the peach trees, there is 
 quite a small cluster of Iris stylosa, which is the 
 most floriferous plant I have ever seen, and pro- 
 vides us with an uninterrupted succession of blooms 
 when frosty nights keep the long out-of-door 
 border of them in subjection. Nor must I forget, 
 for it would be ungrateful to do so, to include in 
 this enumeration a mode of growing violets every- 
 body that sees them admires, but somehow never 
 imitates. If you happen to grow violets in frames, 
 as you probably do, you know that, all the Summer
 
 68 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 through till late September or early October when 
 you lift them to place them in the frames, the 
 runners must be carefully and continuously plucked 
 off. But by leaving these on the ' Tsar ' or 
 ' Princess of Wales,' and planting single roots in 
 large pots early in November, and keeping them 
 on a staging in the cool peach-house, we contrive 
 to have in March a perfect forest of violet flowers, 
 not only crowning and covering the top of the 
 pot, but hanging down all round it in cascades 
 a couple of feet long. I see four of them on the 
 window-sill as I write these lines, and they are a 
 joy to behold. I should be sorry to have to count 
 the flowers on any one of them ; and some in- 
 credulous persons, when I tell them each pot con- 
 tains only one plant, go closer and, while politely 
 pretending to be wholly lost in admiration, are 
 scrutinising to discover whether it is so, or I am 
 the dupe of my gardeners and my self-complacent 
 optimism. However, seeing is believing, and they 
 turn away from the window, employing eulogistic ad- 
 jectives somewhat in excess of any even I should use. 
 The vituperators of English Springs either live 
 in London and have for their experience in March 
 only hat-assailing winds and dust-storms worthy 
 of the Sahara, and have no garden of their own ;
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 69 
 
 or, if they have, they do not come near it till the 
 end of July, or they have such extensive ones that 
 the delight of close and loving observation is 
 unknown to them. Spring is out-and-away the 
 most interesting time of the gardening year. Just 
 as some of the shyer birds will sing lustily till you 
 come near them, but suspend their carolling till 
 you have passed, and then resume their warbling 
 more liberally than ever, so I declare there are 
 Spring flowers that pause in their progress if you 
 stand and look at them, but begin growing again 
 when you have turned your back. Daffodils 
 behave themselves in this manner, and, late as 
 they are this year, I will be bound to say that, in 
 ten days' time, they will be abreast of the season. 
 Yesterday I counted some eighty big groups of 
 them under the oak and in the adjoining orchard, 
 independently, of course, of those in the beds and 
 borders. Everything is worth looking at or 
 watching when one is approaching the vernal 
 equinox. The first celandine, the first daisy, the 
 earliest Siberian Scylla, the most precocious white 
 violets, give a charm to outdoor garden life that 
 tempts to wise idleness, as the Poet pathetically 
 calls it when he is accused of doing nothing, and 
 Lamia is helping him to do it.
 
 70 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' We leave Veronica and you alone,' says 
 Lamia, ' when she is ordering luncheon and you 
 are balancing your accounts. So, as one good turn 
 deserves another, leave us alone in our loitering 
 raptures.' 
 
 As a fact, Veronica I will say nothing about 
 myself has her own closely observant rounds, 
 generally followed by an exhortation to ' wake up ' 
 that affords conclusive evidence of her penetrating 
 peregrinations. I am well aware it is the modest 
 dimension of the garden we love that encourages 
 and renders more easy daily and almost hourly 
 observation. It is the very vastness of the gardens 
 of the opulent that hinders individual interest. It 
 is the modern way, in all things, to descant about 
 bigness, in which all the interesting little details of 
 life and things are submerged and lost. One is 
 expected to fall down and worship a number of 
 ciphers, and to be overawed by the mere mention 
 of the word million. To all such divinities we 
 refuse our homage ; and Veronica has the courage 
 to say that adoration of magnitude is one of the 
 marks of semi-educated persons. 
 
 c Quite true,' says the Poet, borrowing some- 
 thing of her daring. * Half-educated persons 
 shall I say on both sides of the Atlantic ? imagine
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 71 
 
 the old to be novel, the commonplace to be 
 original, and something as ancient as the hills a 
 modern discovery. Such persons and such nations 
 have no Past, though I suppose they are making 
 one. But what a Past ! A Past of gramaphones, 
 multi-millionaires, and the largest circulation in 
 the world ! I wonder what the Future of such a 
 Past will be/ 
 
 Another of the delights of an English Spring is 
 that one ever and anon, though not always I allow, 
 can let the logs burn low on the hearth, open all 
 the windows, and admit the notes of the exhilarat- 
 ing music outside. ' Exhilaration no doubt,' says 
 Lamia, resuming her observation of bird-life and 
 conduct. { The song-thrushes, storm-cocks, and 
 blackbirds, sing loudest and longest in the early 
 morning and late evening, and most appropriately. 
 They chant battle -songs, trumpet-calls, sound 
 fighting fifes and flutes, stimulating courage, and 
 defying the foe. When these cease of a morning, 
 the battle begins, and is carried on all through the 
 day. When twilight arrives, the combatants draw 
 off to their tents in the trees, and shout insolent 
 paeans of victory. You like to persuade yourself 
 they are love -songs sung expressly by masculine 
 devotion to soothe and amuse the poor dear things
 
 72 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 otherwise engaged, sitting patiently on their nests. 
 Don't you believe it. It is not the habit of males 
 anywhere to behave in any such way.' 
 
 ' But surely I have heard you say the contrary ; 
 and I should be astonished if your pattern poet has 
 not pledged himself to that opinion, in verse.' 
 
 ' Verse pledges a man to nothing,' she replied. 
 * And, as for me, have I not told you more than 
 once, that I believe a great many things I know to 
 be not true ? ' 
 
 With this closing remark, Lamia left me to 
 my meditations, and found the Poet among the 
 crocuses and now rapidly unsheathing daffodils 
 under the oak ; and, with him she will indulge, 
 I have little doubt, in the sentiment she refuses to 
 share with me. In justice to them, however, I 
 must allow that, whenever some interesting rural 
 sound or sight arrests their attention, they pause 
 in their sympathetic dialogues, and devote to it 
 minute attention. I can see from here what has 
 attracted it at this moment. A couple of sparrow- 
 hawks have settled on a Douglas pine near the 
 oak. There ! Away they go ; far too wary to 
 trust to the society of murderous man, though it 
 is murder they themselves are bent on, the intended 
 victims being the wood-pigeons that have during
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 73 
 
 the last year or two ventured much nearer to the 
 house and garden than usual, I cannot say why, 
 unless it be that they are increasing in number, 
 and are being crowded out in their accustomed 
 resort in the neighbouring but a little farther off 
 elms. They will assuredly find little enough pro- 
 vender in the kitchen-garden, for everything they 
 could attack is protected by pea -guards. As I 
 have said, many austerely devout lovers object to 
 being married in Lent, but the partridges entertain 
 no such scruple, pairing between them being one 
 of the most interesting incidents of the austere 
 season, and one is continually interrupting their 
 honeymoon. As for the rooks at the back of the 
 house, they are lapsing into comparative quiet, for 
 they have finished their furnishing arrangements, 
 during the making whereof they kept up contin- 
 uous consultations, which Lamia declares remind 
 her of certain chatterings, as she calls them, when 
 Veronica has summoned the maids to pull the 
 furniture about, and give the rooms, as she thinks, 
 a wholly new appearance. On these occasions, the 
 Poet and I get into sad trouble, for we always fail 
 to observe the important transformation that has 
 taken place, and get soundly rated for our lack of 
 observation. Yet, out-of-doors, I think we are
 
 74 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 both observant enough. The other day, when it 
 was suggested that those same sparrow-hawks were 
 probably seeing where they would set up house 
 the suggestion proceeded from one of that half of 
 the population who are always anxious to bring on 
 other folks' nuptials as quickly as possible the 
 Poet observed that sparrow-hawks do not nest 
 before June, probably from the evolved instinct 
 that they need, for safe domestic arrangements, 
 as dense a leaf covering and protection as pos- 
 sible in the woods hard -by that we continually 
 wander in. 
 
 For let no one suppose that we ourselves are 
 garden gaol-birds, and never get beyond self- 
 complacent strolls round and round our narrow 
 precincts. During the last month, the woods have 
 been a daily haunt with us ; for the woodlanders 
 have been hard at work, and I know no more 
 picturesque rural industry than theirs. It is so 
 clean-looking, so wholesome, so illustrative of the 
 many-sided craft of rustic industry. And every 
 dozen years or so it opens out the lie of the ground 
 where it takes place, and lets one see the ups-and- 
 downs of tracts at other times concealed under a 
 certain look of uniformity. The timber, of course, 
 is left alone till May, but everything else is cleared,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 75 
 
 and material is obtained for a dozen different 
 useful purposes. There are the tall straight hop- 
 poles to begin with. Then there are the ' use- 
 poles,' cut into all sorts and sizes for stakes and 
 ' binders.' The material for the making of hurdles 
 is set apart, and everything, till carted away, is 
 stacked on the ground in the most orderly fashion. 
 If you are a townsman and, if you are, I have 
 little doubt you think you know everything do 
 you know what a * spile-fence ' is ? 
 
 ' I know no such word in the English language,' 
 said a highly educated, townsman to me the other 
 day, when I named it. ' I suppose it is a local 
 word,' he added, a touch contemptuously. 
 
 ' Let us look in the dictionary,' I said, with the 
 becoming humility of the rustic. 
 
 We looked, and there the word was, as large 
 as life, and its rootship with ' pile,' with which 
 my urban companion was acquainted, was duly set 
 down. Spile-fences have come much into fashion 
 about us of late. They are made of narrow but 
 substantial stakes of split wood, pointed and driven 
 firmly into the ground at about a couple of inches 
 apart, and linked together near the top by strong 
 wire. They look very neat, and are perfectly 
 effectual for a good many years. Then we must
 
 76 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 not forget the pea-sticks, for peas both edible and 
 sweet, or those important things in the season of 
 the Winter months, faggots for lighting fires and 
 heating ovens. This is a fairly long catalogue 
 of usefulness in the work of woodlanders, which 
 likewise ministers to beauty as well as to utility. 
 Wherever a wood is now being cleared in the 
 manner I have described, next Spring the ground 
 will be a forest of primroses, wind-flowers, and 
 bluebells. Then then every recurring year, 
 surely it is true as ever of the primroses : 
 
 First you came by ones and ones, 
 Lastly in battalions. 
 Skirmish along hedge and bank, 
 Turn old Winter's wavering flank, 
 Round his flying footsteps hover, 
 Seize on hollow, ridge, and cover, 
 Leave nor slope nor hill unharried, 
 Till, his snowy trenches carried, 
 O'er his sepulchre you laugh, 
 Winter's joyous epitaph.
 
 IV 
 
 EVEN if, as I say, you are a townsman, and pos- 
 sess the superior intelligence that one well knows 
 is an urban monopoly, you will surely not deny 
 that the labourers who do the woodland work I 
 have just described cannot be wholly unintelligent. 
 They have no machinery to help them in it, to 
 save them trouble and the effort of thinking. 
 Every stroke of it has to be thought over. Com- 
 pletely to train a man how to do it is impossible, 
 though much can be learnt in that way. For 
 woods vary ; trees vary ; undergrowth varies. 
 Part of it has to be treated in one way, part in 
 another. It cannot be performed by the hard-and- 
 fast rule of any science, unless * scientific ' be taken 
 in its simpler meaning of knowing and understand- 
 ing. It allows a certain latitude of judgment, and 
 will, and choice to the worker ; and that is why it 
 is so welcome to, and so efficiently performed by, 
 
 77
 
 78 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 English folk versed in this branch of woodcraft. 
 For an Englishman is never so thoroughly an 
 Englishman as when he is in a fresh position, 
 particularly if it be a difficult one. ' Leave me 
 alone, and let me do it my own way.' That is 
 our native way of facing difficulties, more especially 
 if there be something new and unforeseen in it ; 
 and so we ' muddle through,' in peace no less than 
 in war. But we do muddle through, and come 
 out on the far side, neither beaten nor baffled, as 
 we have seen happen to some scientific nations, in 
 presence of the unexpected. So Woodlanders, 
 and indeed rustics generally, are not so wanting 
 in intelligence, after all. 
 
 I submitted the foregoing remarks to the Poet, 
 and asked him if he thought them true or the 
 reverse. 
 
 ' Absolutely true,' he replied ; ' and since you 
 ask for my opinion, I will give it frankly. Rustic 
 labourers are not only fully as intelligent as town 
 artisans, but more so. They say less, but they 
 reflect more. In their long silences, they are 
 pondering, in a slow, draught-horse sort of way ; 
 but they are getting over the road carefully and 
 continuously, and on to the end of it. The rural 
 mind thinks for itself, and by itself ; the workers
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 79 
 
 in towns think collectively, if such can properly 
 be called thinking. They move each other, not 
 by reflection, but by emotion and impulse. Their 
 judgment often gets intoxicated by some efferves- 
 cing and frothy orator ; reminding one of what 
 was said of a well-known political leader now no 
 more, by a friendly commentator of his own party, 
 that he resembled second-rate champagne in a first- 
 rate state of effervescence. They are influenced 
 by invectives and gibes in the newspapers they 
 read. They attend closely to their work ; but 
 much of it is, so to speak, wound up for them 
 beforehand, and they and it go like a watch or a 
 pianola. That deadens rather than sharpens obser- 
 vation, and cannot possibly minister to the active 
 employment of the faculties of the thinking kind. 
 The hedger, ditcher, thatcher, catcher, is continu- 
 ally asking himself, for he is forced to do so, 
 " How is this to be done ? " Ditches differ ; straw 
 for thatching is not always of the same length or 
 the same substance. Some hedges are young, some 
 middle-aged, some old, some well-furnished, others 
 in places very bare. Cart-horses are not without 
 a mind of their own, and are not to be trusted. 
 It is easy enough to get the town workman to 
 talk, but he will pay you with words, as the French
 
 80 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 say, and repeat newspaper to you by the furlong. 
 He is a machine driven by other machines. The 
 rustic, even when he knows you well, and feels 
 kindly and trustfully towards you, is slow of 
 speech, for there is no sudden electric communica- 
 tion between his brain and his tongue. The two 
 communicate with each other slowly and at a foot's 
 pace. But he says nothing, when he has nothing 
 to say ; and, when he has something to say, says 
 it without exaggeration or excessive emphasis, and 
 he listens to what you urge or object with attentive 
 but critical ears. Disraeli observed, in his Life of 
 Lord George Eentinck^ that Sir Robert Peel could 
 play on the House of Commons as on an old 
 fiddle, and make it dance and jig to his bowing. 
 A sonorous rhetorician can do pretty much the 
 same with average town audiences, unless his 
 observations run absolutely counter to their pre- 
 judices. The same speaker is listened to by an 
 assembly of rustics without interruption, without 
 cheers, and without any audible enthusiasm ; and 
 he returns to his club in Pall Mall and vows he 
 never addressed such stupid people in his life 
 before. In reality, it is he, not they, that are 
 stupid. They both listened and understood, and 
 went home, in ones, twos, or threes ; and, after
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 81 
 
 having thought it all over, probably without a 
 word to their wives about it, discussed it quietly, 
 and with but a small vocabulary, on the morrow, 
 with each other. They vote when election time 
 comes in just the same way, each man according as 
 he himself thinks. They do not walk to the poll 
 imposingly, in newspaper parlance, five hundred 
 strong, all of one mind, but independently and 
 alone. If that does not show superior intelli- 
 gence, my idea of intelligence must be sadly astray.' 
 
 * Do you think,' I asked, ' there is any connec- 
 tion between this contrast of the rural and the 
 urban mind, and the contrast which is to be 
 observed between Parliamentary representatives 
 drawn from a class more closely connected with 
 the country and the soil, and those whose lives 
 have been spent more exclusively in towns, in 
 trade and manufactures ? " 
 
 ' Unquestionably,' he replied, ' I should say ; 
 and, as I have no intention of standing for an 
 electoral constituency, I can afford to be frank 
 and say exactly what I think. The contrast is 
 marked, and the advantage for practical purposes 
 and the welfare of the State is on the side of the 
 rural class. They seem to me to look at legislation 
 with the eyes and judgment of statesmanship.
 
 82 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Town-bred representatives, as a rule, are political 
 rather than statesmanlike. Our wisest public men 
 have belonged to the former, by origin, training, 
 and taste. We have had prominent public men 
 belonging to the other class, very clever, very 
 brilliant, very energetic, very commanding, if you 
 like, but scarcely wise. If you think Lord 
 Beaconsfield was an exception, and contradicts 
 what I am saying, is it not accurate to reply that, 
 while in origin he belonged to neither, his tem- 
 perament, his affections, his habits, were from the 
 very first of the country sort ? Gifted with an 
 active imagination, he employed it practically to 
 what are called practical affairs ; in other words, to 
 politics, his conduct in which was dictated by a 
 knowledge of human nature and history. Un- 
 imaginative men failed for a long time to under- 
 stand him, but ended by seeing that he towered 
 above them all in statesmanship by virtue of this 
 union of the imaginative and the practical. I fear 
 that the men who are neither imaginative nor 
 practical, but theorisers and sciolists, are at present 
 in the ascendant. If they have their own way, 
 unchecked, they will ruin an ancient Realm and 
 destroy a great Empire. I will go yet farther, 
 and avow the opinion that the House of Lords,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 83 
 
 as a body, are wiser and more statesmanlike than 
 the House of Commons, taken as a body. The 
 former debate, the latter harangue. Whenever 
 I have attended a discussion in the Lords, I felt 
 that, though it was conducted with an almost total 
 absence of eloquence, nearly every one that spoke 
 spoke to the point, and whether I happened 
 to agree or not, was addressing me and persons 
 like me, with reasons I could at least understand. 
 From a debate in the House of Commons I have 
 generally come away with the impression that most 
 of the speakers were talking over my head to the 
 " man-in-the-street," and by no means the sanest 
 and soundest minded in it.' 
 
 Lamia had joined us during the latter part of 
 the foregoing ; and when there came a pause, she 
 took the opportunity of saying : 
 
 ' I am glad such are your sentiments, for they 
 would leave you at the bottom of the poll in any 
 urban constituency in the kingdom ; so one need 
 not be afraid lest we should all be condemned to 
 live in town during the loveliest and most interest- 
 ing of the seasons, while you had a latch-key with 
 which to let yourself in when there had been an 
 all-night series of divisions among the sons of the 
 Mother of Parliaments.'
 
 84 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' Small fear of that,' said Veronica, who was 
 now of the company. * I can scarcely imagine the 
 author of an unpublished invective in verse I read 
 the other day against the Time, for those special 
 evils and omens that are fostered and flourish by 
 it, thanks to the particular form of civilisation 
 that is daily hailed with a paean in newspapers 
 and nightly on popular platforms in the House of- 
 Commons, doing anything of the kind.' 
 
 * When,' asked Lamia, ' are you going to pub- 
 lish it for the benefit of those concerned ? ' 
 
 * Are you referring to Cassandra Speaks ? ' he 
 asked. ' If so, never ! Just as one may justifiably 
 think a thing without saying it, so one may excus- 
 ably write what one would justly be reproached 
 for publishing. A philippic, whether in verse or 
 prose, against an Age is pretty much in the same 
 category as an indictment against an entire nation ; 
 and you know what Burke said of that. A shrewd 
 man of the world once observed, when some one 
 showed him a letter intended for the post, and 
 asked him his opinion of it. " It is the best letter," 
 he replied, " I ever read. And now throw it into 
 the fire." The evils of society are not to be 
 remedied, or the mania of an age arrested, by 
 denunciations either in verse or prose. Where
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 85 
 
 the break is to come from to check the accelerating 
 movement of material civilisation, I own I do not 
 see ; but it is no use crying out " Stop, stop ! ' 
 to persons who are going too fast, but are so 
 delighted and self-satisfied in making such a clatter 
 by their progress that they do not even hear you. 
 Moreover, along with the mischief and dangers, 
 or what one believes to be such, you are referring 
 to, efforts of the noblest, most touching, and most 
 disinterested kind are being made to meet and 
 mitigate their baneful effect ; and, unless accom- 
 panied by recognition of these, wholesale denuncia- 
 tion necessarily seems one-sided and partial. I 
 know there are persons who read a slashing satire 
 or a sonorous philippic solely as a work of Art, 
 and enjoy it simply as such. But years bring a 
 semi-indulgent attitude towards people and things 
 one cannot admire, though perhaps such an atti- 
 tude is merely a sign of the indecision, moral no 
 less than mental, of age.' 
 
 ' I suppose so,' said Veronica. * But I read two 
 sonnets the other day which, it seemed to me, 
 represent that conflict in the mind that may 
 sometimes arise without its incurring the re- 
 proach of indecision. I allude to " Monastery 
 Bells." '
 
 86 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' I was thinking of them,' said Lamia, ' all the 
 time we were talking.' 
 
 ' You may repeat them,' said Veronica, ' if you 
 happen to remember them.' 
 
 ' Since you bid me,' said Lamia, ' I will do so. 
 
 MONASTERY BELLS 
 
 Sometimes when, weary, the sad soul rebels 
 Against the strife and discord all around, 
 One seems to catch the faint and far-off sound 
 Of melody that softly sinks and swells. 
 It is the sound of Monastery Bells, 
 In solitudes by Sanctuary crowned, 
 From meditation peaceful and profound 
 Calling grave Friars to prayer from silent cells. 
 Then yearningly one craves to have release 
 From the crowd's rivalries and worthless prize, 
 To find some spot where Glory's selfish sighs 
 And struggle's endless tribulations cease, 
 To join in Vespers' chant as sunset dies, 
 And pass life's evening in monastic peace. 
 
 But when resound, as day dawns dim and drear, 
 Meanings of anguish, sobbings of distress, 
 From hearthless homes of famished loneliness, 
 With none to rescue, nothing to revere, 
 Again one feels one still is wanted here, 
 To aid, admonish, comfort, and caress, 
 Smooth the rough pillow pallid sufferers press, 
 Stanch the fresh wound, and wipe away the tear.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 87 
 
 So, though one longs as ever to depart, 
 
 And to gross sounds and sighs live deaf and blind, 
 
 Sorrowing one stays with sorrow, still resigned 
 
 To work, unhired, amid life's hireling mart, 
 
 To cherish in the crowd monastic mind, 
 
 And in a world profane a cloistered heart.' 
 
 Lady Day. When things have been kept 
 back, as we say in gardening language, by a 
 lagging Spring, cold if not cruel nights, and 
 absence of encouraging showers, what a rapid 
 start forward they make and how they hurry 
 along when they have once begun to wake up 
 and open their eyes on an expectant and well- 
 prepared world. That is what has happened this 
 year. We have felt nothing of 
 
 Amazonian March with breast half bare, 
 And sleety arrows whistling through the air, 
 
 but a March more like a mild February, crying a 
 halt rather than repeating its own name to muster- 
 ing volunteers of the borders and shrubberies. 
 There is something at once characteristic and 
 delightful in the unpunctuality of the earlier 
 period of the twelvemonth. Is it calculated 
 capriciousness, or only easy-going indifference ? 
 Who shall say ? Spring is an incorrigible 
 coquette, and I suppose that is why she enchants
 
 88 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 us so. That on Lady Day the crocuses under 
 the oak, yellow, white, purple, lilac, in most 
 admired disorder, should only now be beginning 
 to wane, is unprecedented in one's now pretty 
 long experience of times and seasons ; and it is 
 equally beyond my remembrance that, shortly 
 before such a date, one should have been looking 
 for daffodils that had not yet opened. But they 
 are here now, though not in abundance. In a 
 few days more, however, they will be ; and the 
 association of crocuses and daffodils, side by side 
 in one plot of turf a hundred feet by seventy, 
 under the overbranching oak, is a sight quite new 
 to me. To-day is so warm that ever and anon 
 one has not been able to resist the temptation to 
 sit on the freshly-put-out garden-seats which, by 
 the bye, Veronica says want varnishing very badly 
 and listen to the perpetual cawing of the rooks, 
 on household cares intent, to use the Mil tonic 
 language which Taine says the author of Paradise 
 Lost on such occasions employs, as though Eden 
 had been an English middle-class home where of 
 a Sunday respectable people dine at one o'clock. 
 What they are saying, one no more really knows 
 than one can decipher the Etruscan tongue ; 
 though probably, as Lamia suggests, they are
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 89 
 
 ' talking shop,' like the rest of the world, and 
 making such a fuss over the building of a few 
 nests. Then one starts up again, curious to see 
 if merle and mavis, that are singing so jubilantly, 
 have likewise been furnishing, and on the way 
 comes across a blue egg with brownish spots lying 
 on the ground, and draws one's own conclusions. 
 It is the season of seasons for the nuptials of 
 partridges, blackbirds, missel - thrushes, finches, 
 hedge-sparrows, and the rest of the tribe now 
 revelling in their honeymoon, passing their lune de 
 miel at home, while in like circumstances we go 
 off on our travels, some of us for the first time 
 abroad. 
 
 April i . Far from exaggerating, I have under- 
 rated the agreeable results of such hitherto un- 
 known tardiness in the first intimations of Spring. 
 The most delightful of them is the introduction 
 to each other of flowers that, as far as my observa- 
 tion goes, have hitherto been strangers, not even 
 ' on nodding terms. I verily believe the crocuses 
 under the oak intended all the time to remain in 
 beauty, if waningly, till All Fools' day, if only 
 for once to see the daffodils, single, double, deep 
 yellow, pale coloured, as well as the little dwarf 
 ones, the tags (for I know no other name for
 
 90 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 them) ; and even a tulip or two, and a lovely 
 clump of dwarf iris, whose name I believe to be 
 Iris histriO) though I am not quite sure, deep blue, 
 freckled with brilliant gold spots, are sunning them- 
 selves with the utmost self-complacency. The 
 pale blue Anemone Apennina, which they sell in 
 basketfuls in Rome about this season, are showing 
 flower under the wall of the Poet's Corner ; and 
 in a day or two the Crown Imperials will make a 
 gallant show of royal precocity. Lest, however, 
 you should be led to imagine that no misfortunes 
 ever happen in the garden that I love, let me make 
 a distressing confession. In two long beds the 
 yellow Pottebakker tulips have come to utter 
 grief; and I am driven to conclude that either 
 they are too delicate to stand such frosts as we 
 had a little while back, or some subterranean 
 enemy hath done this, when I examine the still 
 perfectly solid bulbs but imperfect flower-sheaths. 
 As they were to flower along with the blue forget- 
 me-not, the gap will be a standing sorrow from 
 the middle of the month till the end of May. 
 Trying to make the best of a bad business, I have 
 sent the gardeners to a neighbouring wood to dig 
 up primrose roots, whose lateness in flowering this 
 year I have recorded, and they must replace the
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 91 
 
 tulips that have ' gone home.' But I know 
 Veronica will lead me a life about them, attribut- 
 ing their failure to some malefic influence of my 
 own, greatly to the satisfaction of Lamia, who 
 loves to see me in trouble, and somewhat to the 
 amusement of the philosophic Poet. 
 
 May Day. May Day this year ought to be 
 ashamed of itself. A procession, field festival, 
 and prize-giving, all in the open air, had been 
 arranged in our nearest and avowedly picturesque 
 village for to-day, and it has rained without inter- 
 mission from dawn to dusk. The lap of May has 
 indeed been chilled by a lingering imitation of 
 winter, and white frocks, neat stockings, and 
 smart little hats have been bedraggled by wind 
 and wet. A learned Pope apparently all Popes 
 do not conform to the general English opinion 
 that they are ignorant and superstitious fanatics, 
 even when not something worse set the world 
 right in the sixteenth century in regard to 
 the heavenly calendar ; and though, since the 
 information proceeded from so tainted a source, 
 our own enlightened country was slow to accept 
 it, and did not do so till 1752, we found ourselves 
 at last forced by a world actually as civilised and 
 progressive as ourselves to do so. The supposed
 
 92 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 most brilliant monarch of to-day, a certain well- 
 known Continental Emperor, has sought to rival, 
 if not to outshine, poor benighted Pope Gregory 
 by proclaiming 1900 to be the first year of the 
 twentieth century in the most approved modern 
 American language, the ' Twent-Cent.' But the 
 Edict has not been deferred to ; though, save 
 in Russia, the Gregorian Calendar now rules 
 throughout Christendom. Yet the twelve days' 
 anticipation of former dates it necessitated has 
 been attended by some non- astronomical draw- 
 backs. Even grave historians and essayists have 
 been betrayed into curious blunders in some of 
 their dates and footnotes, with the result that the 
 alert critic, eager to air that superior knowledge 
 indispensable to the pursuit of his calling, has 
 pounced down on them with traditional scorpions, 
 and flogged away to his heart's content. What 
 is somewhat more important, at least in the eyes 
 of the occupants of the Garden that we love, is 
 the topsy-turvydom the altered calendar often 
 causes in the rustic mind. It will probably be 
 news to those of our omniscient urban parlia- 
 mentary representatives who have all sorts of 
 remedial proposals for land tenure, while knowing 
 as much about it as they do of the satellites of Mars,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 93 
 
 that rural Quarter-days on which rents are paid 
 are not those to be found in fPMtaker's Almanac 
 or Acts of Parliament, but fall twelve days later ; 
 the rustic mind, which of course is always behind- 
 hand, a wiser and less dangerous thing than being 
 * a little previous,' still going with his rent in his 
 hand not on March 25, but on April 6, and not 
 on September 29, but on October n, often 
 receiving a reduction in its amount from a sym- 
 pathetic landlord, which is more than I ever heard 
 of being given, save of other people's money, by 
 the most benevolent ' advanced ' owner of house 
 property in cities. 
 
 ' What very irrelevant observations ! ' the 
 latter will doubtless say, should he condescend to 
 read these pages, with a fine House-of-Commons 
 wave of the hand. But to the more open minds 
 of the country-side the observation will seem 
 pertinent enough, though not in a cut-and-dried 
 fashion. Had the ruling spirit of the May pro- 
 cession and the rest waited till May 13 for the 
 holding of the Children's Festival, he would 
 probably have fared better. But, though a really 
 worthy person, I fear he has got most of his ideas 
 from books, not from personal experience of the 
 seasons ; in this respect somewhat resembling
 
 94 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 other watchful critics, who go on taxing English 
 poets that extol the vernal season with having got 
 their notions concerning it from Theocritus and 
 other literary southern sources, and not from real 
 and actual experience, notwithstanding the amiable 
 retort of a poet in his ' A Defence of English 
 Spring,' when the specious reproof was first 
 addressed to Spring-loving versifiers. 
 
 May 1 1 . Never was the transforming power 
 of the sun shown more surprisingly than during 
 the last three days. The under-average tempera- 
 ture that had so long prevailed and retarded 
 vegetation has suddenly been altered to above- 
 average temperature still more remarkable ; and 
 the Garden that I love, and the parks, commons, 
 and woodlands round it, have all expanded into 
 a scene of intoxicating loveliness. How is it 
 possible to repress the observation, born not of 
 complacency, but of love and the desire to share 
 all good things with others, ' I wish all the world 
 were here to see it ! ' An Italian, gazing on it, 
 would exclaim, ' Oh ! che belluria ! ' which is not 
 adequately rendered into English by ' O what 
 beauty ! ' or by ' How beautiful ! ' but rather by 
 * What beautifulness ! ' For it is the fulness, the 
 reckless bounty and lavishness, that makes it all
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 95 
 
 so wonderful. Two of the Pyrus Malus, as big 
 and bushy as large hawthorn trees, are smothered 
 in blossom ; and others, less large, but some of 
 still deeper colour, bear them in company. Do 
 these, or the double Japanese cherry trees, both 
 white and rose-colour, deserve the prize for 
 efflorescent splendour ? Nor is the gold-flowering 
 berberis to be outdone by them, and adds to its 
 unequalled sheen the attraction of penetrating 
 perfume. Towering above them is a tree it is 
 more like a white fountain than a tree called a 
 Bird Cherry. The but enough, perhaps already 
 overmuch, of panegyric, and I will try to introduce 
 a note of depreciation, though it is difficult where 
 everything in general looks so beautiful. Though 
 the birds keep singing incessantly, I have noticed 
 that the lambs have bleated this year much less 
 than usual. I suspect it is that they bleat when 
 they are uncomfortable and cold, or want some- 
 thing or other they have not got. Lamia suggests 
 that no one makes a noise who is perfectly con- 
 tented, and that even poets, on the authority of 
 one of them, learn in suffering what they teach 
 in song. 
 
 ' As witness ours ! ' I said somewhat sar- 
 donically.
 
 96 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 * I quite understand your insinuation,' Lamia 
 replied. 'But how can you, or I, or any one 
 tell ? Poor fellow, he too may have been cradled 
 into poetry by wrong, though how, when, or 
 where, I allow, does not appear. And perhaps 
 it never happened at all.' 
 
 ' Likely enough,' I said, * or to any of the 
 musically miserable race. Probably the tradition 
 is only a poetic fiction.' 
 
 ' Possibly,' added Lamia, with unusual assent 
 to a suggestion of mine. ' There is nothing more 
 utterly misleading than translating poetic fictions 
 into realistic prose. Yet let us not forget we 
 have been told that, as the sun draws up the mists 
 of the valley to the mountain tops, to melt them 
 to ether, 
 
 So the effulgent mind 
 
 Can call up sorrow to its own great height, 
 To dissipate it there. 
 
 ' And what says the wisest, as the greatest of 
 
 all poets ? 
 
 Shall we rest us here, 
 And, by narrating tales of others' griefs, 
 See if 'twill teach us to forget our own. 
 
 Does not that explain a good many things in this 
 world that might otherwise be unintelligible ? '
 
 May 30. Lest it should be thought that we are 
 so wedded to our Garden that we never leave it, I 
 may recall that we have recently paid a visit to the 
 northern coast of Somerset and Devon, to spots 
 familiar of old to the Poet, in days concerning 
 which we ask only discreet questions, but not 
 before visited by the other denizens of the Garden 
 that we love. With a rare freedom from local 
 prejudice, he has often said that the West of 
 England is much superior to the East, more 
 picturesque, more various, more musical, for it 
 abounds in streams, bounding torrents, and wind- 
 ing rivers, in which the Home Counties are sadly 
 wanting. 
 
 ' Nor are these its only advantages,' he goes on 
 to say ; 'it is more primitive, more simple in its 
 ways, still uninfluenced, save in one or two much- 
 frequented watering-places, by the malefic example 
 
 97 H
 
 98 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of London, its monotonous luxury, extravagance, 
 and feverish yearning for artificial pleasure. And 
 then, Veronica,' he crowns all by saying, ' it is 
 much cheaper/ 
 
 ' Let us put all this to the test,' was the triple 
 reply ; and so westward we went. 
 
 There was a consensus of opinion as we began 
 to get deeper into western scenery. What an 
 undulating world ! What greenery ! What lush- 
 ness ! What twisting, rippling, happy, dimpling 
 streams ! See, see ! there are the otter hounds at 
 work, and country folk of all sorts afoot after 
 them ! How we should have liked to pull the 
 check-string of the railway carriage and get down 
 and run across the intervening mead and join the 
 amphibious chase ! And the hills, the dense 
 sloping woodlands, the richness of vegetation and 
 prospect everywhere ! Lamia produced one of 
 the Poet's fishing-fly books, and held it up to him 
 with a significant gesture. But he checked her 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 * Yes, Lamia, there are trout in all these streams, 
 far more than in our sluggish water at home, but 
 they are much smaller, and afford much poorer 
 sport than our one, two, three -pounders. But 
 everything else is better here/
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 99 
 
 1 Except the Garden,' I pleaded humbly. 
 
 * Don't be too sure of that,' said Veronica. * I 
 should think that, for gardening, this is an even 
 better sort of Ireland in many ways, and we know 
 what that is.' 
 
 ' Perhaps including its untidiness,' I rejoined, 
 not to be outdone. 
 
 * A plague on gardens,' exclaimed Lamia. ' Are 
 we never to get away from them ? These woods 
 and meadows and rambling, laughing, irresponsible 
 waters are worth all the gardens in the world, even 
 when written about and illustrated.' 
 
 We were making for as primitive a place as 
 there is in the Island, probably the most primitive 
 of all the places answering to the wants of a simple 
 but reasonably refined life, and reached it early in 
 the evening, after a nine miles' drive from the 
 nearest station. 
 
 ' This is as far as I can go,' said our driver ; 
 'you must please to walk down to the village.' 
 
 Very cautiously on the part of Veronica, very 
 recklessly on that of Lamia, the slippery stones of 
 the broad stair-steps down to the village were 
 descended, till we reached the top of a narrow 
 village street of picturesque old-world cottages, 
 that still kept dipping down in the same fashion,
 
 ioo THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 to a diminutive port at the bottom. All the little 
 houses had small, but well-stocked, gardens in 
 front of them, and half-way along them there was 
 an inn, whose sign-board swayed in the breeze on 
 the upper balcony. Our ' things ' were brought 
 down in well-balanced panniers on donkeys, whose 
 iron-shod feet sounded pleasantly on the round, 
 slippery stones, and the Poet said it reminded him 
 of his boyhood, not in the West, but in the North, 
 of England, where there were thatched cottages 
 and oatcake, and a silvery snow-cold torrent sang 
 adown what was called the village street, and 
 declared the world was a better world then than in 
 days of motor-cars, grand cosmopolitan hotels, and 
 foreign waiters. Our reception was by a deaf 
 old lady, who dropped us a curtsey as in the days 
 of the Armada, duly recognised by Veronica and 
 Lamia with a friendly handshake, and by the Poet 
 with one of his finest salutations, the old lady's 
 married daughter, and their smiling handmaidens. 
 Having been shown our white- curtained rooms, 
 the various approaches to which were by up-and- 
 down steps perilous to incautious movements, we 
 were told dinner would be ready for us as soon as 
 ever we wished, but over the way, down the inn 
 steps across the narrow street, and up some fresh
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 101 
 
 ones. Lamia declared she was as hungry as a 
 whole hunting-field, in a voice that would have 
 created an appetite in the most dyspeptic, and we 
 are none of us that. We fell to with a will to a 
 meal welcome in its perfect simplicity, everything 
 being piping hot though fetched from across the 
 street, except the cold stewed gooseberries and 
 Devonshire cream at the end of our repast. 
 
 'What could the unvitiated palate or unde- 
 moralised man wish for more ? ' asked the Poet. 
 ' But the line must always be drawn somewhere ; 
 and I advise you, Veronica, not to ask for coffee.' 
 
 When we woke the following morning, we 
 found the narrow, long street festooned with 
 flags, and inquired what was going to happen. 
 We were told that a county celebrity who had 
 never been there was staying at the Court with 
 the owner of the village and all the country 
 round, and that, as everybody wished to see him, 
 he would probably walk up or down its boulder- 
 paved way. In the course of the morning he did 
 so ; and, as we happened to have some acquaint- 
 ance with him, and were sitting in the inn balcony 
 as he passed, he stopped to have a little talk with 
 us, and made the owner just referred to and us 
 acquainted ; and the result was we were hospitably
 
 loz THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 made free of all the more private drives and walks 
 in the neighbourhood. 
 
 * See ! ' said the Poet, ' what comes of patri- 
 archal government, so much abused in these en- 
 lightened days. There is no colossal hotel, for 
 such would not be tolerated by the benighted 
 and unbeknighted owner of the place, no rush of 
 curious, indifferent tourists, flourishing their finery 
 or blowing their horns for six hours at the sea- 
 side, but only water-colour painters with their 
 unpretentious easels placed wherever it suits the 
 artist to place them, poets humming to themselves, 
 and quiet, deliberate thinkers. Thank Heaven ! 
 there are still a few such places left.' 
 
 We quitted the sheltered backwater with silent 
 regret, Veronica reminding us that we had engaged 
 rooms in the same county at a spot which the Poet 
 had declared, before he left home, combined the 
 most varied scenery with the fullest union of beauty 
 and majesty of any in the United Kingdom, if 
 exception were made of Killarney and GlengarifF. 
 As we approached it, I could see he manifested a 
 certain anxiety as to whether it would be thought 
 he had drawn a somewhat long draft on the deposit 
 book of imaginative memory. But it turned out 
 quite otherwise. Lamia was glowingly silent, and
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 103 
 
 Veronica rapturously admiring, as we passed into 
 the garden of a comparatively small hotel with a 
 lowly roof and name, and, over flowering trees and 
 shrubs which, were I honest, which I cannot pos- 
 sibly be on such a subject, I should perhaps allow 
 outdid those of a certain other garden, gazed down 
 on to the open sea, along a magnificent coast line, 
 and then up to wooded hills and wild moorland, 
 while rippling music reached us from an unseen 
 torrent somewhere not far away. There were 
 many signs of advanced civilisation, as compared 
 with the rickety old place of the age of the Armada, 
 evidently not wholly unwelcome to Veronica. 
 
 So far so good. But after an exploration of a 
 most enchanting kind, a bell rang, and it was 
 dinner time. A Continental male waiter of spot- 
 less garments, faultless manners, and evidently 
 much capacity, showed us to our table, rather as 
 though it were a pew ; and then there slowly 
 streamed in to the other tables a number of as 
 respectable-looking persons, mostly of the more 
 impeccable sex, as I ever saw. 
 
 * Oh ! ' gasped Lamia, which elicited a rebuking 
 shake of the head from Veronica, and a smile 
 behind his unfolded napkin from the Poet. 
 
 * Do you think they have all been to church ? '
 
 104 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 asked Lamia, unobservant of Veronica's admoni- 
 tion. 
 
 * You forget it is not Sunday,' I said. 
 
 ' Not at all,' she replied. * Respectable people 
 do not confine their devotions to one day in the 
 week. Is it Lent ? ' 
 
 ' On the contrary,' said the Poet, catching from 
 her the spirit of revolt, ' it is Whitsun week, a week 
 of rejoicing.' 
 
 ' Then let us rejoice,' cried Lamia, * though I 
 fear that will make us rather exclusive.' 
 
 ' I wonder what they are like when they are at 
 home,' said the Poet. 
 
 ' I know,' said Lamia, ' for I once saw them, 
 and to the best advantage, for it was Sunday 
 afternoon, which, as I have said, I know this is 
 not. I have heard it stated that good Americans, 
 when they die, go to Paris, though I believe they 
 now come to London. Wicked English people, 
 while still alive, are sent from Saturday to Monday to 
 Tonbridge Wells. That is how I came to be there.' 
 
 The Poet, growing worse and worse, indeed 
 absolutely fearless, told her that if she did not 
 behave better, he felt sure she would be sent 
 upstairs to dine by herself. The following day 
 she did not appear at luncheon till it was quite
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 105 
 
 over, and then declared she had been unable to 
 meet so many well-behaved people three times a 
 day, and had enjoyed some stewed gooseberries 
 and Devonshire junket in her own room. But 
 when the day arrived for our departure, we all 
 felt a pang at leaving such a magnificent medley 
 of Nature's stern, sweet, lofty, and lordly aspects, 
 resounding streams and silent mountains, indented 
 coast and crags fronting a channel broad enough 
 to be mistaken for the open sea. And now that 
 we are at home again, we recall only our enjoy- 
 ment, and, according to the kindly dispensation 
 under which we live, even Lamia quite forgot the 
 irreproachable deportment of uncongenial British 
 respectability. 
 
 Midsummer Day. While not allowing that 
 either we or our neighbours have done anything 
 to be entitled to fine weather, I must say that I 
 never before saw so ill -conducted a May and 
 June. Days of sunlessness and showers have 
 been followed by gloomy twilights and cold nights. 
 Yet neither bird nor bloom has taken notice of 
 the cheerlessness of the season. Song-thrush and 
 blackbird, blackcap and garden warbler, have 
 lived, loved, and chanted as jubilantly as ever ; 
 and I must be forgiven for saying, since it is the
 
 io6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 bare truth, that this, I daresay, over-belauded 
 Garden has never before been more agreeable to 
 the eye. At this moment it is a forest of flowers, 
 crowning lavish leafage, of faultless form, uninjured 
 colour, and growth of unprecedented lushness. 
 Do not expect from me the enumeration of rare 
 plants and recondite flowers. Did I not once say 
 that I see no reason why a garden should be 
 either a museum or a hospital, though, rightly 
 enough, places are kept apart for these by the 
 botanically inclined. Ours is still, and is likely 
 to remain, what a now penitent lady called an 
 ignorant garden ; full of common things for the 
 common eye and heart, but, as far as I have 
 observed, as good and thriving of their kind as 
 are to be found anywhere. There are irises, from 
 four inches to four feet high. Many are between 
 those extreme measurements ; the Spanish irises 
 blend with the two-year-old French tea-roses 
 blessings on la belle France^ if only for its roses ! 
 and among the first-year-flowering China ones, 
 Laurette Messimy for choice, with its ruby- 
 coloured stems and buds and ineffably beautiful if 
 fragile blooms, the annual Marguerite carnations 
 promise to flower as profusely as ever. The 
 Quaker-maid Violas, for the original strain of
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 107 
 
 which we have to thank Mr. Speaker, who, I 
 should think, longs to leave the Chair for his 
 terraces in the North, not occupied by tea-tables 
 and, one would have thought, rather unsuitable 
 guests for a serious, if it be any longer a serious, 
 House of Commons, but with secular yew-trees, 
 have done splendidly as a broad edging round the 
 rose-beds ; and, by dint of constant picking off 
 of the seeding flowers, they prolong their stay 
 for four months. Creeper and larkspur, the latter 
 of every imaginable shade of blue, clematis and 
 pceony poppy clamber so as to be conspicuously 
 seen ; a Frogmore Anchusa italica, Anglice 
 Alkanet, of the Boragewort tribe, and the smaller 
 and finer perpetual Verbascum, lavender-coloured 
 Erigeron or Fleabane, dwarfer but many branch- 
 ing annual sunflowers, and well-contented Love- 
 in-a-Mist, would all sun themselves if they could, 
 but contrive wonderfully well to do without the 
 sunshine that has so long been due. Several visitors 
 have said that our Love-in-the-Mist is of a deeper 
 blue than theirs, and beg for seed, which of course 
 they can have in any quantity, though we have 
 our doubts about the greater deepness of the blue, 
 or attribute it to wiser cultivation of some 
 kind.
 
 io8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Do you cry, * Enough ! enough ! ' and shall 
 I change the subject? I will directly, for Lamia 
 is coming this way and doubtless will change it 
 for me. But, before I do so, I want to pay 
 homage to the roses from the foot to the corner of 
 the house ; much-improved, more vigorous, more 
 clambering descendants of the dear old matronly 
 Gloire de Dijon, the William Allen Richardson 
 which I prefer to call the Apricot Rose, the large 
 single white ones, the Carmine Pillar, the Maids 
 of the Village, which, if you like the foreign 
 lady's name, you can call Aimee Guibert, the 
 Crimson Rambler, which, despite hasty assertions, 
 and lugubrious prophecies, has mingled in the 
 most friendly manner with the last, as with large 
 white roses does the purple Clematis, and more 
 that I have no doubt I have overlooked, or have 
 ignored, because, however handsome they may be, 
 they bear the name of men and women, and even 
 princesses. No one at any rate, no man 
 deserves to have had a rose christened by his 
 name. Remember what Urania says in Fortunatus 
 the Pessimist ; and we all, perhaps from a little 
 natural partiality, find her the most lovable 
 gardener in the world.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 109 
 
 URANIA. 
 
 Look on this rose 
 
 Fantastically called The Poet's Dream : 
 Yet not without a reason, for it roams, 
 Rambles, and climbs, no pillar, porch, nor wall 
 Will satisfy its vagrancy ; and should 
 You try to prune its wanderings or check 
 Its heavenward aspiration, lo ! it dies. 
 And so I let it gipsy as it will, 
 Most careless and capricious of the roses, 
 And therefore most desired ; a rose too free 
 To bloom in bondage. 
 
 FORTUNATUS. 
 
 O wise wilding rose ! 
 You are a fairy godmother, and well 
 You moralise your garden. 
 
 You see I cannot stop, and, like a garrulous 
 speaker at a public dinner, plead * only one word 
 more,' which invariably turns out to be several. 
 But tribute must be paid to the repairing power 
 of Nature. I daresay you have forgotten, but 
 after years of procrastination and petitioning for 
 reprieve, the oak near the Manor Pound, that, to 
 be truthful, never had any merit save its look of 
 hoar antiquity, and was probably born old many 
 generations ago, had to be condemned to be be- 
 headed and then uprooted, lest it should commit 
 unhappy despatch for itself, and in its suicidal
 
 no THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 compact with a fierce south wind deal destruction 
 around as it tottered to its end. That was three 
 years ago. We all know what is an ill wind. 
 But three summers have come and gone ; and 
 where it stood and had a considerable space of 
 deep shade to itself there is now one of the most 
 sunny yet sheltered spots in the garden, where 
 both dwarf Iris stylos<e and late German ones 
 prosper amazingly, and there are yet more roses, 
 Japanese Briars, old-world English roses, Celestial 
 and Maiden's Blush, and, loveliest of all, after the 
 eglantine in the hedges, a row of Penzance Briars 
 producing wreaths, curves and festoons of colour, 
 a perfect rainbow of scented hues. 
 
 1 1 quite agree with Veronica,' says Lamia, who 
 has now joined me with an instinctive surmise of 
 my self-complacent raptures, 'that your' why 
 mine ? ' your Lilium auratum stalks look most 
 unpromising. How is this ? ' 
 
 ' You must ask the all-conquering Japanese,' I 
 replied. * You cannot think worse of their appear- 
 ance and prospects than I do, and I fear it comes 
 of an excessive demand for them and the un- 
 scrupulous packing of them by those enterprising 
 islanders, who, I am told, are rather slippery 
 customers in commerce, before the bulbs are
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE in 
 
 properly ripened off. The Poet,' I went on, in 
 order to shield myself against any further de- 
 preciation of what I am not responsible for, 
 4 made some suggestive observations the other 
 day pertinent to this question/ 
 
 ' His observations are always pertinent,' she 
 replied, and I smiled inwardly at the success of 
 my diplomatic tact. ' I think,' she went on, ' I 
 know to what you refer. He pointed out that 
 in all periods of transitional thought and belief 
 the conscience suffers, since its old sanctions have 
 been removed and none other have yet taken 
 their place. It is undermined, without being 
 adequately propped. Hence your measly-look- 
 ing lilies from the Flowery Land. Hence, too, 
 perhaps, my own elastic conscience, always in a 
 state of transition. Still, I have one saving 
 quality. I cling to my prejudices, and, by way 
 of valuable advice, I say to you, Never give up 
 your prejudices. They are the one last barrier 
 between one and the utter demoralisation of one's 
 thoughts and feelings.' 
 
 I looked as grave as might be under this 
 paradoxical peroration, and gazed into the heart 
 of a Shirley poppy. 
 
 ' Are not the poppies beautiful ? ' she asked :
 
 ii2 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' the fairest, the most fragile, the most fateful of 
 all the flowers, the very type of so many women ; 
 a dainty and deadly opiate. I see the Chinese 
 are going to shut up their opium dens. When 
 shall we do the same with ours, and forbid the 
 importation of the drug from No. 226 one 
 millionth 94th Street, New Canterbury, U.S.A. ? " 
 St. Swithins Day. On this auspicious day for 
 the conservatively reverent, or, if you like, hope- 
 fully superstitious mind, the weather has taken a 
 turn for the better ; the sun is shining with 
 dazzling effect, and it is full summer in more 
 than name. Flowers there were in profusion 
 already, but the sunshine heightens their beauty, 
 and sets off their charm as, some people would 
 say, an ample supply of wax candles sets off other 
 lovely creatures and their diamonds. Delighted 
 as we are at the change, we are rather sorry for 
 ourselves that the otherwise welcome transforma- 
 tion should have come when we had arranged and 
 subscribed for three afternoon concerts in London. 
 For, as I said just now, we are not so narrow and 
 exclusive in our tastes as my imperfect record of 
 our days might lead you to suppose. Lamia still 
 enchants us from time to time with her unpro- 
 fessional but native gift of song ; and, in default
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 113 
 
 of better, and as a musical makeshift, we have the 
 best pianola we could find, and Veronica, with 
 that infatuation for perfection and thoroughness 
 with which you are acquainted, has devoted an 
 amount of study and practice to it which enable 
 her to extract from it all it is capable of yielding, 
 and, of an evening, plays her favourite composer, 
 Chopin, who is perhaps the most uniformly in- 
 spired musical man of genius since Mozart. But 
 Music is so beloved by the Poet, and indeed by all 
 of us, that we often go where alone, within reach, 
 it is to be had at its very best, just for the day. 
 He has always declared that Music is a luxurious 
 necessity, a stimulant of the mind, and a soother 
 of the soul, as Dante avers in the Second Canto 
 of the Purgatorio it so often was to him also, 
 when Casella Casellio mio, my Casella, as with 
 grateful affection he calls him and he meet in 
 Purgatory. 
 
 ' Can you recall the lines for me, Lamia ? ' I 
 asked. Thereupon, with that wonderful memory 
 of hers, she begins : 
 
 ' Ed io : Se nuova legge non ti toglie 
 Memoria o uso all' amoroso canto 
 Che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie, 
 Di ci6 ti piaccea consolare alquanto
 
 ii4 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 L' anima mia, che con la sua persona 
 Venendo qui, e affannato tanto. 
 
 Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, 
 
 Commencio egli allor si dolcemente, 
 
 Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.' 
 
 ' What a striking anticipation, more than six 
 hundred years before, is that last line,' I said, ' of 
 Wordsworth's couplet : 
 
 The music in my heart I bore 
 Long after it was heard no more.' 
 
 But what, for the moment, is so illustrative of 
 what I was urging is the yearning in the passage 
 for the soothing power of Music, so felt by the 
 Poet and Lamia, because, affannato tanto, so 
 wearied by the burden of the body. Accordingly 
 he, and therefore, of course, she, prefer Mozart 
 to any other composer, and are always ready to 
 do battle for his essential superiority to all other 
 men of genius who have expressed themselves by 
 sheer music. 
 
 ' One has had to pass, in one's lifetime, through 
 periods,' he observes, ' when this estimate was re- 
 garded as a mark of one's inferiority, a reproach 
 very easy to put up with, just as, in one's 
 admiration of Raphael, one has gone through a 
 similar experience. But mankind, in the long
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 115 
 
 run, are sane as regards music, painting, poetry, 
 and the other arts, just as they are, in the long 
 run, in things political and social. There are 
 periodical aberrations from sanity ; but the high 
 road of right reason and correct taste is by-and-by 
 returned to.' 
 
 * Are we just at present,' I asked, * on the sane 
 high road of judgment and feeling, or deviating 
 from it ? ' 
 
 * I think,' he answered, * one sees encouraging 
 symptoms of a disposition to return to it, after 
 rather long aberration. I suppose people, whose 
 preferences repose on no thought-out principle nor 
 conviction, but are swayed by every wind of 
 doctrine and sentiment, get tired of just balance 
 in the various Arts, so conspicuous in Mozart in 
 music, notwithstanding his unfailing genius, and 
 in Raphael in painting ; and the truly marvellous 
 boy, who composed a lovely sonata at eight, and 
 Handel, Haydn, and Weber, and their musical 
 congeners, did not satisfy a time craving, not for 
 repose in the Arts, but for excitement. The 
 locomotive, the telegraph, telephones, motor-cars, 
 and the rest aggravated this tendency, and made 
 them long for something stimulating. In music, 
 Meyerbeer did his best to satisfy them, but was
 
 ii6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 not quite equal to the task he set himself. But, 
 the Hour having come, this time the Man also 
 came, a man unquestionably of great genius, but 
 not quite a Mozart, and very different from 
 him, to 
 
 Rend with tremendous sound your ears asunder. 
 
 Wagner "{stimulated " and still stimulates them, 
 as the phrase is, with a vengeance. Mozart is 
 always inspired ; that is to say, he does not go 
 in search of musical themes, having no necessity 
 to do so, because they come to him incessantly. 
 Wagner is inspired, and most happily inspired 
 sometimes, but only sometimes, and, where he is 
 not, he ekes out inspiration by astounding craft 
 and ingenuity, and stimulates the ganglionic 
 centres of his worshippers with wave after wave 
 of the same idea slightly altered each time it 
 rises and falls. But I suspect the world gener- 
 ally is getting affannato tanto^ rather weary of 
 telephones, motor-cars, and other feverish, stimu- 
 lating appliances, and, if only at week-ends, 
 craves for the tranquillity, shall we say, of a 
 garden. Let that feeling grow, and Mozart, 
 Raphael, and Poets, Sculptors, and Architects 
 akin to them, will come by their own once
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 117 
 
 more. Kings, true kings, always get back their 
 kingdoms.' 
 
 ' You sound,' said Veronica, ' a more hopeful 
 note than usually. Do you think that in politics 
 and society, likewise, there are signs of a return 
 to sanity ? ' 
 
 ' Let us hope so,' he replied, ' and, in any 
 case, let us be patient, and not make the common 
 mistake of confusing the Passing with the 
 Permanent.' 
 
 ' Meanwhile,' said Lamia, ' the mad world, our 
 masters, is not an unamusing performance, so long 
 as one is not obliged to be one of the performers.' 
 
 Do you remember Veronica once saying of The 
 Garden that I Love, ' The peculiarity of this kitchen- 
 garden is that it contains no vegetables.' There 
 was a little ornamental exaggeration in the taunt, 
 but a certain amount of truth underlying it. 
 Where there should have been rows of succulent 
 spinach, there flowered dazzling sweet-williams, 
 homely - smelling lavender where you would 
 naturally have looked for broad beans, and 
 intrusive roses between rows of Scotch kail. 
 There were more sweet than edible peas, and 
 many - coloured pumpkins in lieu of plainer but 
 useful vegetable - marrows. We have gradually
 
 n8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 changed all that. Not that flowers have been 
 entirely banished from the kitchen - garden, for 
 many - branching sunflowers still tower above 
 breadths of lettuce, and onion-patches are tempered 
 by soaring hollyhocks. But perhaps the most 
 noticeable alteration is the comparatively large 
 space assigned to strawberries. Strawberries, I 
 allow, are not vegetables, but neither are they 
 flowers, and I have never heard Veronica, even in 
 her most culinary moments, say a word against 
 them. Lamia and the Poet, as is the habit of 
 romantic people, are very fond of what that 
 delightful, thoroughly human man of genius, Mr. 
 Barrie, has gracefully christened Little Mary, and 
 get into the finest of frenzies as they glance from 
 bed to bed with the predatory gaze of the full-, 
 grown song-thrush. At the same time they have 
 made several valuable suggestions concerning the 
 prolongation of the strawberry season, and indeed 
 have done everything to the growing of these 
 except contributing one single stroke of honest 
 work, their custom being to reap but not to sow. 
 Lamia has spent many hours, she says, in fathom- 
 ing the subject, and now has delivered a lecture to 
 me embodying her conclusions. 
 
 4 Your earliest crop must be from Royal Sovereign
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 119 
 
 and Laxtons Monarch, by no means ideal straw- 
 berries, but as precocious as Mozart, if not so 
 sweet. Furthermore, they must be planted on a 
 gentle slope looking south or south-west, and they 
 must be renewed every two years. They are 
 colossal in size and lavish croppers.' 
 
 Here she interrupted her discourse by suiting 
 the action to the word, and giving an illustration 
 of her meaning by plunging under the net, and 
 distorting her bow-shaped mouth by putting into 
 it a succulent monster. 
 
 ' You cannot,' she went on, * feed these generous 
 bearers too liberally, on much the same principle, I 
 suppose, though I am necessarily rather ignorant 
 in such matters, that I have observed old-fashioned 
 people apply to monthly nurses. Given the above 
 treatment and a proper aspect, these two early 
 bearers will provide you with bowls of fruit for a 
 good fortnight before any others show ripe berries. 
 Your main crop, which will then be quite ready, 
 had better be Sir Joseph Paxton, which will carry 
 you on for a fortnight more, if you have the good 
 sense not to give them all one aspect. Doctor 
 Hogg) the best substitute for British Queen^ since 
 resembling it in flavour, bearing much more freely, 
 and in every way to be relied on, will by the end
 
 izo THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of that fortnight be laden with large handsome 
 fruit ; and it also, if a certain number of plants be 
 grown in a cool but not overshaded position, will 
 prolong your strawberry season through a fifth 
 week, and in some seasons well into a sixth. 
 Should you, or should you not, grow Waterloo ? 
 You shall decide that point for yourself. They 
 are very dark in colour, nearly black outside, and a 
 rich red within, and they ripen later. But they 
 are very soft in texture, and unless they are gathered 
 just at the right moment, creepers and crawlers 
 make way into their heart. Moreover, with the 
 judicious treatment I have told you of, Doctor 
 Hogg can be got to go on bearing large fine- 
 flavOured fruit almost as late as Waterloo. Now, 
 do not suppose I am unacquainted with all the 
 other sorts to be found in Nursery Catalogues. 
 But I wish to save you unnecessary embarrassment, 
 and having delivered this invaluable information I 
 think I am entitled to be elected a Fellow of the 
 Royal Horticultural Society.' 
 
 ' You are one already,' I said. 
 
 ' Am I ? ' she replied. ' I am so many dis- 
 tinguished things that I had forgotten, perhaps 
 because Veronica pays the subscription for me. I 
 am, as you know, shockingly ignorant of flowers,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 121 
 
 and I scorn to know anything whatever about 
 vegetables. But in fruit, most of all in consuming 
 and passing an opinion on it, I am an expert. And 
 since Mr. Mallock has explained so lucidly in his 
 enthralling investigation of the most recondite 
 problems of Political Economy that the mind 
 contributes more than the hand to the production 
 of wealth, I will thank you to roll back that net, 
 and this intellectual labourer will have her due 
 share of what I see is underneath it. Could 
 Veronica herself be more practical? And who 
 will now venture to say, if you appropriate the 
 information I have given you, The Garden that I 
 Love is about everything save gardening ? ' 
 
 Thus, thanks to that conflict of opinion that 
 springs from differences of temperament, The 
 Garden that I Love now blends the utile with the 
 dulce, and we are just as self-complacent about our 
 out-door fruit and Jerusalem artichokes as about the 
 oak we did not plant and the roses that were reared 
 in France. Is this egotism ? If it be, I think it 
 is pardonable so long as it is not accompanied by 
 unreadiness to remember that there are oaks and 
 roses elsewhere. A belief in one's own swans is 
 an excusable foible, provided it be not accompanied 
 by an assumption that other people have nothing to
 
 izz THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 show but geese. We had an excellent illustration 
 the other day of the generous modesty that inverts 
 that process, and which recognises the superiority 
 of others in respect of a yet more important matter 
 even than gardening. Not a few visitors to the 
 Old Country from the United States honour us 
 by including our home in the range of their 
 sympathetic curiosity ; and one of them who was 
 made welcome the other day expatiated in the 
 handsomest manner on the race he regards as his 
 ancestors. 
 
 'What strikes me,' he said, 'in the folks in 
 these Islands is their enduring vitality and masculine 
 vigour. An old Land it is, and, in a sense, you 
 are an old people. But I think you are, on the 
 whole, the youngest race I know. To use a 
 homely illustration, though you do not talk loudly, 
 you cough and do other kindred things with un- 
 equalled violence. Some perhaps would say that 
 it is due to your climate. But in almost every- 
 thing you display the activity and independence ot 
 youthfulness. You do everything with a certain 
 amount of deliberation, thinking before you act, 
 which some hasty observers mistake for slowness. 
 There is said to be extraordinary strenuousness in 
 my people at home. But you are equally strenuous,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 123 
 
 though more quietly so. Your boys, and even 
 your girls, take to outdoor games as a duck 
 takes to water. You are not very disciplined, for 
 youth hates discipline. But look at your mental 
 freshness, alike in Science and Literature. I may 
 say it here, though I should have to be cautious in 
 saying it on our side of the water ; but I regard it 
 as a remarkable circumstance that, during the two 
 hundred and fifty years of our existence as a 
 separate nation, we have produced some graceful 
 poets and several agreeable men of letters, but not 
 given birth to a Poet in, or anywhere near, the 
 first class. Yet, though you already had your 
 Chaucer, your Spenser, your Shakespeare, your 
 Milton, your Dryden, your Pope, you have had 
 since, and within the last hundred years, your 
 Scott, your Wordsworth, your Byron, your Shelley, 
 your Keats, and your Tennyson. There is no 
 surer sign of youthfulness than the production of 
 fine Poetry ; and you are producing it still. I note 
 and confess the fact. Have you, sir,' he said, 
 turning pointedly to our Poet, ' any theory on the 
 subject ? ' 
 
 Thus pointedly appealed to, he replied 
 ' Your country has done, and continues to do, 
 so much in this world, and contributes so largely
 
 124 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 to the sum of human effort, that you can well 
 afford to be as frank and generous as you have 
 shown yourself, and to accept, in good part, what 
 seems to me to be the explanation you are in 
 search of. Your people, as distinct from our- 
 selves, and as a separate nation, were born, so to 
 speak, not young, but in the full flower of man- 
 hood. Oddly and, as it seems to me, inaccurately, 
 you are described and still spoken of as a 
 young people. But may I venture to ask if, 
 collectively, and, as a national entity, you ever had 
 any youth ? You branched off from these Islands, 
 ready provided, not with the qualities of youth, 
 but with those of meridian manhood, and the tens 
 of thousands from other parts of Europe that seek 
 the hospitality of your shores, are not young but 
 already full-grown. We, meanwhile, with tradi- 
 tional continuity of character and temperament, 
 have retained a certain spirit of youthfulness, or 
 what Wordsworth so beautifully calls " the young 
 lamb's heart amid the grown-up flocks." In the 
 next place, I should say the enduring love of a 
 country life deep-seated in all classes of our people, 
 and their familiarity with hills, streams, woodland, 
 moorland, and sea-shore, have ministered materially 
 to the continued production of poets among us.
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 125 
 
 Finally, we are an aristocratic people, in the true 
 sense of the word, and what are, to my ears 
 improperly, called the lower classes are the most 
 aristocratic in feeling of all. Now Poetry, as the 
 best flower of Literature, is intellectually aristo- 
 cratic though sentimentally democratic. By the 
 unceasing arrival of immigrants from all parts of 
 the world, you are, figuratively speaking, perpetu- 
 ally putting water into your wine. We were 
 brewed and racked off long ago, and being rather 
 strong drink, have remained sound to this day. 
 That it may last still longer is my fervent prayer.' 
 
 * And mine also, sir,' said our magnanimous 
 guest, and so took farewell. 
 
 I could see the Poet was greatly delighted by 
 the foregoing conversation, and in the course of 
 the evening, as we sate under the oak, he reverted 
 to it. 
 
 ' It was most exhilarating,' he said, * to hear 
 such a panegyric of England, especially in these 
 days when we hear so much of how precarious is 
 its position, unless it be saved from extinction by 
 what used to be called our Colonies, but that now 
 have grown so self-complacent, thanks to the 
 exaggerated language concerning them employed 
 by some of our own men of Light and Leading,
 
 iz6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 that they describe themselves, and wish to be 
 spoken of, as Sister Nations. Well, names matter 
 but little, provided they do not mislead. But 
 when I remember that, as our American guest 
 of to-day said, England has produced Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Tenny- 
 son ; Bacon, Newton, and Darwin ; Marlborough, 
 Nelson, and Wellington ; Clive and Warren 
 Hastings ; Fielding, Dickens, and Thackeray ; that 
 it is England which founded our Indian Empire, 
 and established and still chiefly maintains our 
 Supremacy on the Seas ; and when I compare this 
 magnificent and multiform manifestation of genius, 
 capacity, and vigour with what the Sister Nations 
 have as yet contributed to the Empire or mankind, 
 I confess I wax indignant at the flying in the face 
 of incontestable fact, in speaking of " poor little 
 England," and talking of it as though it were the 
 smallest factor in British greatness and power, 
 instead of being, as it really is, the toweringly 
 predominant partner with unlimited responsibility, 
 while all the others, with (at their own wish) a 
 strictly limited liability, contribute a Lilliputian 
 share. I have now liberated my mind, and feel 
 relieved.'
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 127 
 
 * What a pity/ said Lamia, * you cannot enun- 
 ciate such sentiments from a more resounding 
 pulpit.' 
 
 ' Use your irresistible influence, Lamia,' said 
 Veronica, ' with the reforming Powers-that-Be to 
 procure for the Poet a seat in the Upper Chamber 
 without a Peerage.' 
 
 * I will go about it at once/ said Lamia ; * but 
 I am rather afraid lest I should have prepossessed 
 them against me by more than once remarking 
 that of all reforms the one most needed is the 
 reformation of certain Reformers themselves. 
 That is a kind of Charity that I think ought to 
 begin at home, only they seem rather averse from it.' 
 
 The next day, which was so bright and warm 
 that it led to much sitting out under shady trees, 
 the Poet so far returned to the topic of the previous 
 evening as to say : ' I rather think that, in availing 
 myself of the opportunity so courteously accorded 
 me by our American visitor, I overlooked one 
 influential cause of the persistent production of 
 poetry of high seriousness, to use Matthew Arnold's 
 phrase, among us. You all know the view 
 with which I have long laboured to modify the 
 prevailing opinion that purely lyrical poetry is 
 poetry of the highest order, which it very rarely
 
 128 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 is, however delightful and seductive may be its 
 quality ; since for the greatest poetry Intellect 
 must combine with Feeling, and poetry, genuine 
 poetry, must be born of high thoughts fused and 
 made one with deep emotion. Such in poetry is 
 the highest achievement of all ; and the silently 
 meditative and pondering disposition of our race, 
 most conspicuous in the classically educated of 
 them, furnishes the conditions out of which alone 
 great Poets are best evolved. That is the prosaic- 
 ally worded explanation of what I would say, and 
 have said so often. But you know my incorrigible 
 habit of embodying ideas, such as they are, in 
 verse, and as I have not yet written down nor 
 dictated to Lamia a sonnet that came to me this 
 morning on that theme, I will, if you like, try to 
 recall it.' 
 
 Lamia, who seems to think that somehow or 
 other her co-operation is needed on such occasions, 
 moved closer to him and took his hand in hers. 
 Thus assisted he recited : 
 
 GREAT NUPTIALS 
 
 Now for great nuptials let the bells be rung, 
 
 And immemorial symphonies resound, 
 
 From high-groined roof time-tattered bannerets hung, 
 
 And flowers round porch and pillar wreathed and wound,
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 129 
 
 For Soul with Mind is coming to be wed, 
 Feeling with Intellect to seal its troth, 
 Inseparable bond twixt heart and head, 
 With hierarch Wisdom dominating both. 
 A splendid offspring shall from them be born, 
 Poetry, first and noblest of the breed, 
 Sculpture, and Song, and Painting, to adorn 
 Cathedrals open unto every Creed : 
 Race that shall never older grow than now, 
 But wear eternal youth upon their brow. 
 
 October. It always seems to me that the most 
 pathetic month of the year is October ; for, so it 
 be windless and sunny, which it usually is in our 
 part of the world, the beauty of one's garden is of 
 rich matronly mellowness and distinction. But 
 the Damoclean sword of Winter hangs over its 
 head, and no one knows when the Fates will cut 
 the cord, and let the sharp frosty blade fall upon 
 the predestined victim, as it awaits, in stationariness, 
 the descent of doom. Legends are the gradual 
 growth of kindly imagination ; and I will not 
 pledge myself to the absolute accuracy of the 
 following. But Veronica often tells how the Poet, 
 when once allowed to occupy the out-door bedroom, 
 whose origin and advantages I trust you remember, 
 rising in the middle of the night to saunter in the 
 Garden, since the full moon was smiling sweetly 
 
 K
 
 130 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 on every bank, suspected the intentions of that 
 fascinating female luminary, and that she would, 
 when she saw the sun was coming, blight all its 
 posies with a chilling frost. Thereupon, he carried 
 out from his bedroom every chair that was in it, 
 placed them round about the beds containing the 
 most tender things, and then stretched all the 
 newspapers he could lay his hands on in the 
 adjoining lumber-room, then his dressing-gown, 
 and finally his quilt, and some say the sheets over 
 these again, and prolonged the existence of the 
 fragile for some time. For the noticeable thing 
 about October frosts is that they often come with 
 the dawn just once, play the mischief, and then do 
 not recur for several weeks: 
 
 Now we have been taught by experience, and 
 the idee mere attributed to the Poet has by gradual 
 evolution given birth to cunningly adjusted gauze 
 and tiffany, after going through a period of the 
 bitterest controversy with the Maids, in con- 
 sequence of the Poet, to whom, I really don't 
 know why, they always give in at last, over their 
 dust-sheets, which he declared were just the thing 
 for sheltering the flower-beds against an early 
 solitary frost, while they, on the contrary, main- 
 tained that their precious coverings were being
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 131 
 
 ruined. Finally, Veronica, overhearing the Poet 
 pleading in his most persuasive manner, ' Oh, 
 but you'll let me have them ! ' said, * Have 
 what ? ' 
 
 Then the dreadful truth came out ; and Lamia, 
 pretending, in order to shield him, that the idea 
 had proceeded from her, got a serious lecture for 
 her wasteful frivolity ; and the dust-sheets were 
 withdrawn into private life. Then Lamia came 
 to the rescue. 
 
 ' Who/ she asked, * is thepremiere danseuse just 
 now, at those Palaces I once went to with the 
 Poet ? I will write to her, unless ' turning to 
 me ' you prefer to write to her yourself, and ask 
 her where she gets all those short but delicate 
 gossamer flounces that satisfy the Lord Chamber- 
 lain and Censor of Plays and Morals ; and then 
 she perhaps will send us furlongs of it to dance 
 and swing in the wind, with all the innocence of 
 our blameless rural life.' 
 
 ' I cannot help saying to myself sometimes,' 
 observed the Poet this morning, * What an un- 
 eventful and unromantic life people must have had 
 to read the novels they seem to peruse with such 
 eager curiosity. I am not alluding to novels of 
 adventure like, say, A Gentleman of France or Les 
 
 K 2
 
 132 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Trois Mousquetaires, for we none of us can well 
 have had, in these days, quite such captivating 
 experiences as they describe. I am alluding to 
 novels the bulk of those published the theme 
 of which is Elk et Lui, Elle et Moi, or Moi et Lui. 
 I cannot help feeling sorry for such readers, that 
 their days have been so utterly destitute of amiable 
 episodes as to render the reading of vicarious romance 
 so enthralling. Nor am I thinking of the novels, 
 far too numerous of late, in which the supposed 
 romance in them is the very opposite of romantic ; 
 being wholly sensual, and sometimes revolting. 
 It is a pity there is no longer a common hang- 
 man to burn such outrages on masculine dignity 
 and feminine delicacy. That, by the way. But 
 what I would point out is, that romantic ex- 
 periences between human beings cease to be 
 romantic, when narrated realistically in prose, or 
 indeed in prose at all, since they require, for the 
 communication of them to others, the intensifying 
 imaginative magic of Poetry. Just think of Romeo 
 and Juliet or As Tou Like It fading into the 
 common light of day by being turned into a 
 novel ! Imagine but alas ! it has been done 
 Dante's terse but all-sufficing recital of the love- 
 tragedy of Francesca de Rimini, degraded into a
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 133 
 
 spun-out stage-play for the delectation of the 
 groundlings ! That indeed is enough to make 
 the angels weep. But can such fantastic tricks 
 be evidence of human progress, of which we hear 
 so much ? The trashiest novels have ousted and 
 replaced the noblest poems in the affections of 
 nine out of ten readers of to-day. To state that 
 fact is to brand the Age with mental deteriora- 
 tion and spiritual eclipse. Thank heaven ! into 
 the Garden that we love that poison has not 
 penetrated.' 
 
 ' Fit audience, though few,' murmured Veronica, 
 with her inexhaustible generous optimism. * There 
 are, and there always will be, readers and loving 
 readers of Poetry, though it may seem to be 
 dethroned from its ancient place in the affection 
 among mankind at large. I think I have heard 
 you say that the inferior will, if left free to 
 choose, always prefer the inferior, in other words 
 what is most congenial to them. In old days, 
 Authority used to say, read this, read that ; and 
 the revered advice was obeyed. In these days, 
 Authority is extinct ; and critics' judgment, for 
 the most part, humours and follows the majority, 
 otherwise the inferior, instead of trying to in- 
 struct their choice, and direct their taste. Hence,
 
 134 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Literature nowadays means, and is synonymous 
 with, Novels. Yet let us not forget your distinc- 
 tion between the Passing and the Permanent. 
 Novels vanish, poems endure. Of Poetry we 
 may say, Thou art always the self-same, and 
 thy years shall not fail.' 
 
 Lamia had listened intently to all the fore- 
 going, but contributed no word, either playful or 
 serious to it. But when Veronica ceased, she took 
 the Poet's hand more timidly than usual, and, 
 while a slight and most becoming colour came 
 into her cheeks, said : 
 
 * I wrote some verses this morning, which 1 
 am sure are not poetry, though they were sincerely 
 felt while I did so.' 
 
 ' Do let us hear them,' said Veronica. 
 
 * Yes, do indeed,' echoed the Poet and my- 
 self. 
 
 Whereupon, with yet heightened colour, she 
 recited : 
 
 Awake ! awake ! 
 
 For the merle in the brake 
 
 Is louder and louder singing ; 
 Arise ! arise ! 
 The lark in the skies 
 
 Is heavenward wheeling and winging. 
 The dew of the dawn is on leaf and lawn, 
 
 And gleams on the blushing roses ;
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 135 
 
 Haste, haste, as so oft, ere in copse and croft 
 The nightingale's nocturn closes. 
 
 Would you have her not wait at the garden gate, 
 
 Where she trembles, but longs to meet you, 
 And with crimsoning cheek like a snow-tipped peak, 
 
 She will hold out her hand to greet you ? 
 Then away, away, through the love-long day, 
 
 O'er meadow, and wood, and heather ; 
 You may roam where you will, through the vale, up the hill, 
 
 Together, and still together. 
 
 That is all ; for there it stopped.' 
 
 ' It was about time it did,' said Veronica 
 smilingly. * But the lines are very musical.' 
 
 * Yes,' said the Poet. 
 
 * They are very musical,' said Veronica. As 
 for me, I thought them beautiful beyond 
 words. 
 
 ' Yes,' said the Poet ; c they have music, and, 
 I almost think, poetry in them, even if, dear, it 
 be lyrical poetry of a perhaps rudimentary kind. 
 But what I also notice, and what pleases me in 
 them, is the evidence they give of the plasticity 
 of the English language, which, I once heard an 
 erudite German philologist say, he being familiar 
 with almost every tongue and every literature, 
 he believed to be one of the causes of the con- 
 tinuous superiority of English poetry for six
 
 136 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 hundred years. A poet, of adequate craft, can 
 do pretty much what he likes with it. The 
 supreme master, modern master at least, in this 
 respect, is Byron, who could write : 
 
 The desolator desolate, 
 
 The victor overthrown, 
 The arbiter of others' fate 
 
 A suppliant for his own, 
 
 and in The Isles of Greece and The Army of 
 Sennacherib^ Nebuchadnezzar, and numbers of other 
 lyrical poems, exhibits and maintains this dominat- 
 ing directness of diction, written as if with electric 
 instantaneousness. * 
 
 * I am glad,' said Lamia modestly, * I read my 
 poor little verses, since they have elicited your 
 commentary.' 
 
 But I say, as for me, I preferred the verses 
 themselves, and shall ask for a copy of them. 
 
 Occasionally Lamia admits us all to the inner- 
 most sanctuary of her real feelings ; and she did so 
 this afternoon, when we had finished tea under the 
 now wide-spreading tulip-tree. A song-thrush hard 
 by, suddenly, as is the wont with his tuneful tribe, 
 burst into a passing reminiscence of his amorous 
 vernal notes ; and Lamia, quite forgetful of the 
 prosaic reasons she had adduced as to the real
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 137 
 
 cause of their trilling and gurgling, said, in her 
 deepest and richest tone 
 
 May I recite " The Deeper Note " ? ' 
 
 The Poet remained silent, but Veronica replied 
 
 ' Yes, do, dear ! ' 
 
 Thereupon, with variations of inflection out- 
 vying every merle or mavis that ever enchanted 
 the woodlands, she recited to us as follows : 
 
 THE DEEPER NOTE 
 
 i 
 Birds of victorious Spring, 
 
 Through sunshine and through rain 
 Sing, sing, sing, 
 
 Reiterate the strain ; 
 To you life doth not bring 
 Sadness or pain. 
 
 ii 
 Your unforeboding song, 
 
 With each returning year, 
 Is just as sweet and strong, 
 
 As silvery and clear, 
 As when the Attic throng 
 
 Stood, husht, to hear. 
 
 in 
 Yet something do you miss 
 
 Of what to us is lent ; 
 The spiritual bliss, 
 
 The whispered message sent 
 From unseen world to this, 
 
 For our admonishment :
 
 138 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 IV 
 
 The mystery half-divined 
 
 Of ' Where,' when we depart, 
 
 Leaving our loved behind 
 Alone to bear the smart, 
 
 High melodies of mind, 
 Deep music of the heart. 
 
 v 
 So would I not exchange 
 
 For your my graver lot, 
 The wider reach and range 
 
 Of feelings you have not, 
 Experience rich and strange, 
 
 And fondness unforgot. 
 
 With the last word she rose, and walked slowly 
 away, for I suspect she was near to breaking down. 
 
 Shortly I said : 
 
 4 What a blessed day it was we made The 
 Garden that I Love.' 
 
 * Yes,' added the Poet, ' and, still more, when 
 Lamia came into it.' 
 
 THE END 
 
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