THE GARDEN.
I remember nothing more to disturb the even flow of my life till I was
nearly seventeen. Many pleasant things had come and gone; many pleasant
things kept coming and going. I had studied tolerably well--at least my
uncle showed himself pleased with the progress I had made and was making.
I know even yet a good deal more than would be required for one of these
modern degrees feminine. I had besides read more of the older literature
of my country than any one I have met except my uncle. I had also this
advantage over most students, that my knowledge was gained without the
slightest prick of the spur of emulation--purely in following the same
delight in myself that shone radiant in the eyes of my uncle as he read
with me. I had this advantage also over many, that, perhaps from
impression of the higher mind, I saw and learned a thing not merely as a
fact whose glory lay in the mystery of its undeveloped harmonics, but as
the harbinger of an unknown advent. For as long as I can remember, my
heart was given to expectation, was tuned to long waiting. I constantly
felt--felt without thinking--that something was coming. I feel it now.
Were I young I dared not say so. How could I, compassed about with so
great a cloud of witnesses to the common-place! Do I not see their
superior smile, as, with voices sweetly acidulous, they quote in reply--
“Love is well on the way;
He'll be here to-day,
Or, at latest, the end of the week;
Too soon you will find him,
And the sorrow behind him
You will not go out to seek!”
Would they not tell me that such expectation was but the shadow of the
cloud called love, hanging no bigger than a man's hand on the far
horizon, but fraught with storm for mind and soul, which, when it
withdrew, would carry with it the glow and the glory and the hope of
life; being at best but the mirage of an unattainable paradise, therefore
direst of deceptions! Little do such suspect that their own behaviour has
withered their faith, and their unbelief dried up their life. They can
now no more believe in what they once felt, than a cloud can believe in
the rainbow it once bore on its bosom. But I am old, therefore dare to
say that I expect more and better and higher and lovelier things than I
have ever had. I am not going home to God to say--“Father, I have
imagined more beautiful things than thou art able to make true! They were
so good that thou thyself art either not good enough to will them, or not
strong enough to make them. Thou couldst but make thy creature dream of
them, because thou canst but dream of them thyself.” Nay, nay! In the
faith of him to whom the Father shows all things he does, I expect
lovelier gifts than I ever have been, ever shall be able to dream of
asleep, or imagine awake.
I was now approaching the verge of woman-hood. What lay beyond it I could
ill descry, though surely a vague power of undeveloped prophecy dwells in
every created thing--even in the bird ere he chips his shell.
Should I dare, or could I endure to write of what lies now to my hand, if
I did not believe that not our worst but our best moments, not our low
but our lofty moods, not our times logical and scientific, but our times
instinctive and imaginative, are those in which we perceive the truth! In
them we behold it with a beholding which is one with believing. And,
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”,
could not Wordsworth, and cannot we, call up the vision of that hour? and
has not its memory almost, or even altogether, the potency of its
presence? Is not the very thought of any certain flower enough to make me
believe in that flower--believe it to mean all it ever seemed to mean?
That _these_ eyes may never more rest upon it with the old delight, means
little, and matters nothing. I have other eyes, and shall have yet
others. If I thought, as so many have degraded themselves to think, that
the glory of things in the morning of love was a glamour cast upon the
world, no outshine of indwelling radiance, should I care to breathe one
day more the air of this or of any world? Nay, nay, but there dwells in
everything the Father hath made, the fire of the burning bush, as at home
in his son dwelt the glory that, set free, broke out from him on the
mount of his transfiguration. The happy-making vision of things that
floods the gaze of the youth, when first he lives in the marvel of
loving, and being loved by, a woman, is the true vision--and the more
likely to be the true one, that, when he gives way to selfishness, he
loses faith in the vision, and sinks back into the commonplace unfaith of
the beggarly world--a disappointed, sneering worshipper of power and
money--with this remnant of the light yet in him, that he grumbles at the
gloom its departure has left behind. He confesses by his soreness that
the illusion ought to have been true; he seldom confesses that he loved
himself more than the woman, and so lost her. He lays the blame on God,
on the woman, on the soullessness of the universe--anywhere but on the
one being in which he is interested enough to be sure it exists--his own
precious, greedy, vulgar self. Would I dare to write of love, if I did
not believe it a true, that is, an eternal thing!
It was a summer of exceptional splendour in which my eyes were opened to
“the glory of the sum of things.” It was not so hot of the sun as summers
I have known, but there were so many gentle and loving winds about, with
never point or knife-edge in them, that it seemed all the housework of
the universe was being done by ladies. Then the way the odours went and
came on those sweet winds! and the way the twilight fell asleep into the
dark! and the way the sun rushed up in the morning, as if he cried, like
a boy, “Here I am! The Father has sent me! Isn't it jolly!” I saw more
sun-rises that year than any year before or since. And the grass was so
thick and soft! There must be grass in heaven! And the roses, both wild
and tame, that grew together in the wilderness!--I think you would like
to hear about the wilderness.
When I grew to notice, and think, and put things together, I began to
wonder how the wilderness came there. I could understand that the
solemn garden, with its great yew-hedges and alleys, and its oddly cut
box-trees, was a survival of the stately old gardens haunted by ruffs and
farthingales; but the wilderness looked so much younger that I was
perplexed with it, especially as I saw nothing like it anywhere else. I
asked my uncle about it, and he explained that it was indeed after an old
fashion, but that he had himself made the wilderness, mostly with his own
hands, when he was young. This surprised me, for I had never seen him
touch a spade, and hardly ever saw him in the garden: when I did, I
always felt as if something was going to happen. He said he had in it
tried to copy the wilderness laid out by lord St. Alban's in his essays.
I found the volume, and soon came upon the essay, On Gardens. The passage
concerning the wilderness, gave me, and still gives me so much delight,
that I will transplant it like a rose-bush into this wilderness of mine,
hoping it will give like pleasure to my reader.
“For the heath, which was the third part of our plot, I wish it to be
framed, as much as may be, to a natural wildness. Trees I would have none
in it; but some thickets, made only of sweetbriar, and honnysuckle, and
some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries,
and primroses. For these are sweet, and prosper in the shade. And these
to be in the heath, here and there not in any order. I like also little
heapes, in the nature of mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths) to be
set, some with wild thyme; some with pincks; some with germander, that
gives a good flower to the eye; some with periwinkle; some with violets;
some with strawberries; some with couslips; some with daisies; some with
red roses; some with lilium convallium; some with sweet-williams red;
some with beares-foot; and the like low flowers, being withall sweet and
sightly. Part of which heapes, to be with standards, of little bushes,
prickt upon their top, and part without. The standards to be roses;
juniper; holly; beareberries (but here and there, because of the smell of
their blossom;) red currans; gooseberries; rosemary; bayes; sweetbriar;
and such like. But these standards, to be kept with cutting, that they
grow not out of course.”
Just such, in all but the gooseberries and currants, was the wilderness
of our garden: you came on it by a sudden labyrinthine twist at the end
of a narrow alley of yew, and a sudden door in the high wall. My uncle
said he liked well to see roses in the kitchen-garden, but not
gooseberries in the flower-garden, especially a wild flower-garden.
Wherein lies the difference, I never quite made out, but I feel a
difference. My main delight in the wilderness was to see the roses among
the heather--particularly the wild roses. When I was grown up, the
wilderness always affected me like one of Blake's, or one of Beddoes's
yet wilder lyrics. To make it, my uncle had taken in a part of the heath,
which came close up to the garden, leaving plenty of the heather and
ling. The protecting fence enclosed a good bit of the heath just as it
was, so that the wilderness melted away into the heath, and into the wide
moor--the fence, though contrived so as to be difficult to cross, being
so low that one had to look for it.
Everywhere the inner garden was surrounded with brick walls, and hedges
of yew within them; but immediately behind the house, the wall to the
lane was not very high.