May

May 2nd.--Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said,

"I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of

life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to

grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they

will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months

in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the

things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On

wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the

pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on

the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be

perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there

on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have

discovered there is peace."

"Mind you do not get your feet damp," said the Man of Wrath, removing

his cigar.

It was the evening of May Day, and the spring had taken hold of me body

and soul. The sky was full of stars, and the garden of scents, and the

borders of wallflowers and sweet, sly pansies. All day there had been a

breeze, and all day slow masses of white clouds had been sailing across

the blue. Now it was so still, so motionless, so breathless, that it

seemed as though a quiet hand had been laid on the garden, soothing and

hushing it into silence.

The Man of Wrath sat at the foot of the verandah steps in that placid

after-dinner mood which suffers fools, if not gladly, at least

indulgently, and I stood in front of him, leaning against the sun-dial.

"Shall you take a book with you?" he asked.

"Yes, I shall," I replied, slightly nettled by his tone. "I am quite

ready to admit that though the fields and flowers are always ready to

teach, I am not always in the mood to learn, and sometimes my eyes are

incapable of seeing things that at other times are quite plain."

"And then you read?"

"And then I read. Well, dear Sage, what of that?"

But he smoked in silence, and seemed suddenly absorbed by the stars.

"See," he said, after a pause, during which I stood looking at him and

wishing he would use longer sentences, and he looked at the sky and did

not think about me at all, "see how bright the stars are to-night.

Almost as though it might freeze."

"It isn't going to freeze, and I won't look at anything until you have

told me what you think of my idea. Wouldn't a whole lovely summer, quite

alone, be delightful? Wouldn't it be perfect to get up every morning for

weeks and feel that you belong to yourself and to nobody else?" And I

went over to him and put a hand on each shoulder and gave him a little

shake, for he persisted in gazing at the stars just as though I had not

been there. "Please, Man of Wrath, say something long for once," I

entreated; "you haven't said a good long sentence for a week."

He slowly brought his gaze from the stars down to me and smiled. Then he

drew me on to his knee.

"Don't get affectionate," I urged; "it is words, not deeds, that I want.

But I'll stay here if you'll talk."

"Well then, I will talk. What am I to say? You know you do as you

please, and I never interfere with you. If you do not want to have any

one here this summer you will not have any one, but you will find it a

very long summer."

"No, I won't."

"And if you lie on the heath all day, people will think you are mad."

"What do I care what people think?"

"No, that is true. But you will catch cold, and your little nose will

swell."

"Let it swell."

"And when it is hot you will be sunburnt and your skin spoilt."

"I don't mind my skin."

"And you will be dull."

"Dull?"

It often amuses me to reflect how very little the Man of Wrath really

knows me. Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as

happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people

have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do

not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel

disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of

birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during

which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it

is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago

who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves.

They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how

can you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great deal

into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if

you try for ever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has

not got it in him to be happy. The only result probably would be that

you knock your own out of yourself. Obviously happiness must come from

within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my

present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me

more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.

"I wonder," I remarked after a pause, during which I began to suspect

that I too must belong to the serried ranks of the femmes incomprises,

"why you think I shall be dull. The garden is always beautiful, and I am

nearly always in the mood to enjoy it. Not quite always, I must confess,

for when those Schmidts were here" (their name was not Schmidt, but what

does that matter?) "I grew almost to hate it. Whenever I went into it

there they were, dragging themselves about with faces full of indignant

resignation. Do you suppose they saw one of those blue hepaticas

overflowing the shrubberies? And when I drove with them into the woods,

where the fairies were so busy just then hanging the branches with

little green jewels, they talked about Berlin the whole time, and the

good savouries their new chef makes."

"Well, my dear, no doubt they missed their savouries. Your garden, I

acknowledge, is growing very pretty, but your cook is bad. Poor Schmidt

sometimes looked quite ill at dinner, and the beauty of your floral

arrangements in no way made up for the inferior quality of the food.

Send her away."

"Send her away? Be thankful you have her. A bad cook is more effectual a

great deal than Kissingen and Carlsbad and Homburg rolled into one, and

very much cheaper. As long as I have her, my dear man, you will be

comparatively thin and amiable. Poor Schmidt, as you call him, eats too

much of those delectable savouries, and then looks at his wife and

wonders why he married her. Don't let me catch you doing that."

"I do not think it is very likely," said the Man of Wrath; but whether

he meant it prettily, or whether he was merely thinking of the

improbability of his ever eating too much of the local savouries, I

cannot tell. I object, however, to discussing cooks in the garden on a

starlight night, so I got off his knee and proposed that we should

stroll round a little.

It was such a sweet evening, such a fitting close to a beautiful May

Day, and the flowers shone in the twilight like pale stars, and the air

was full of fragrance, and I envied the bats fluttering through such a

bath of scent, with the real stars above and the pansy stars beneath,

and themselves so fashioned that even if they wanted to they could not

make a noise and disturb the prevailing peace. A great deal that is

poetical has been written by English people about May Day, and the

impression left on the foreign mind is an impression of posies, and

garlands, and village greens, and youths and maidens much be-ribboned,

and lambs, and general friskiness. I was in England once on a May Day,

and we sat over the fire shivering and listening blankly to the north-

east wind tearing down the street and the rattling of the hail against

the windows, and the friends with whom I was staying said it was very

often so, and that they had never seen any lambs and ribbons. We Germans

attach no poetical significance to it at all, and yet we well might, for

it is almost invariably beautiful; and as for garlands, I wonder how

many villages full of young people could have been provided with them

out of my garden, and nothing be missed. It is to-day a garden of

wallflowers, and I think I have every colour and sort in cultivation.

The borders under the south windows of the house, so empty and

melancholy this time last year, are crammed with them, and are finished

off in front by a broad strip from end to end of yellow and white

pansies. The tea rose beds round the sun-dial facing these borders are

sheets of white, and golden, and purple, and wine-red pansies, with the

dainty red shoots of the tea roses presiding delicately in their midst.

The verandah steps leading down into this pansy paradise have boxes of

white, and pink, and yellow tulips all the way up on each side, and on

the lawn, behind the roses, are two big beds of every coloured tulip

rising above a carpet of forget-me-nots. How very much more charming

different-coloured tulips are together than tulips in one colour by

itself! Last year, on the recommendation of sundry writers about

gardens, I tried beds of scarlet tulips and forget-me-nots. They were

pretty enough; but I wish those writers could see my beds of mixed

tulips. I never saw anything so sweetly, delicately gay. The only ones I

exclude are the rose-coloured ones; but scarlet, gold, delicate pink,

and white are all there, and the effect is infinitely enchanting. The

forget-me-nots grow taller as the tulips go off, and will presently

tenderly engulf them altogether, and so hide the shame of their decay in

their kindly little arms. They will be left there, clouds of gentle

blue, until the tulips are well withered, and then they will be taken

away to make room for the scarlet geraniums that are to occupy these two

beds in the summer and flare in the sun as much as they like. I love an

occasional mass of fiery colour, and these two will make the lilies look

even whiter and more breathless that are to stand sentinel round the

semicircle containing the precious tea roses.

The first two years I had this garden, I was determined to do exactly as

I chose in it, and to have no arrangements of plants that I had not

planned, and no plants but those I knew and loved; so, fearing that an

experienced gardener would profit by my ignorance, then about as

absolute as it could be, and thrust all his bedding nightmares upon me,

and fill the place with those dreadful salad arrangements so often seen

in the gardens of the indifferent rich, I would only have a meek man of

small pretensions, who would be easily persuaded that I knew as much as,

or more than, he did himself. I had three of these meek men one after

the other, and learned what I might long ago have discovered, that the

less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and that

no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity. The

first of these three went melancholy mad at the end of a year; the

second was love-sick, and threw down his tools and gave up his situation

to wander after the departed siren who had turned his head; the third,

when I inquired how it was that the things he had sown never by any

chance came up, scratched his head, and as this is a sure sign of

ineptitude, I sent him away.

Then I sat down and thought. I had been here two years and worked hard,

through these men, at the garden; I had done my best to learn all I

could and make it beautiful; I had refused to have more than an inferior

gardener because of his supposed more perfect obedience, and one

assistant, because of my desire to enjoy the garden undisturbed; I had

studied diligently all the gardening books I could lay hands on; I was

under the impression that I am an ordinarily intelligent person, and

that if an ordinarily intelligent person devotes his whole time to

studying a subject he loves, success is very probable; and yet at the

end of two years what was my garden like? The failures of the first two

summers had been regarded with philosophy; but that third summer I used

to go into it sometimes and cry.

As far as I was concerned I had really learned a little, and knew what

to buy, and had fairly correct notions as to when and in what soil to

sow and plant what I had bought; but of what use is it to buy good seeds

and plants and bulbs if you are forced to hand them over to a gardener

who listens with ill-concealed impatience to the careful directions you

give him, says Jawohl a great many times, and then goes off and puts

them in in the way he has always done, which is invariably the wrong

way? My hands were tied because of the unfortunate circumstance of sex,

or I would gladly have changed places with him and requested him to do

the talking while I did the planting, and as he probably would not have

talked much there would have been a distinct gain in the peace of the

world, which would surely be very materially increased if women's

tongues were tied instead of their hands, and those that want to could

work with them without collecting a crowd. And is it not certain that

the more one's body works the fainter grow the waggings of one's tongue?

I sometimes literally ache with envy as I watch the men going about

their pleasant work in the sunshine, turning up the luscious damp earth,

raking, weeding, watering, planting, cutting the grass, pruning the

trees--not a thing that they do from the first uncovering of the roses

in the spring to the November bonfires but fills my soul with longing to

be up and doing it too. A great many things will have to happen,

however, before such a state of popular large-mindedness as will allow

of my digging without creating a sensation is reached, so I have plenty

of time for further grumblings; only I do very much wish that the

tongues inhabiting this apparently lonely and deserted countryside would

restrict their comments to the sins, if any, committed by the indigenous

females (since sins are fair game for comment) and leave their harmless

eccentricities alone. After having driven through vast tracts of forest

and heath for hours, and never meeting a soul or seeing a house, it is

surprising to be told that on such a day you took such a drive and were

at such a spot; yet this has happened to me more than once. And if even

this is watched and noted, with what lightning rapidity would the news

spread that I had been seen stalking down the garden path with a hoe

over my shoulder and a basket in my hand, and weeding written large on

every feature! Yet I should love to weed.

I think it was the way the weeds flourished that put an end at last to

my hesitations about taking an experienced gardener and giving him a

reasonable number of helpers, for I found that much as I enjoyed

privacy, I yet detested nettles more, and the nettles appeared really to

pick out those places to grow in where my sweetest things were planted,

and utterly defied the three meek men when they made periodical and

feeble efforts to get rid of them. I have a large heart in regard to

things that grow, and many a weed that would not be tolerated anywhere

else is allowed to live and multiply undisturbed in my garden. They are

such pretty things, some of them, such charmingly audacious things, and

it is so particularly nice of them to do all their growing, and

flowering, and seed-bearing without any help or any encouragement. I

admit I feel vexed if they are so officious as to push up among my tea

roses and pansies, and I also prefer my paths without them; but on the

grass, for instance, why not let the poor little creatures enjoy

themselves quietly, instead of going out with a dreadful instrument and

viciously digging them up one by one? Once I went into the garden just

as the last of the three inept ones had taken up his stand, armed with

this implement, in the middle of the sheet of gold and silver that is

known for convenience' sake as the lawn, and was scratching his head, as

he looked round, in a futile effort to decide where he should begin. I

saved the dandelions and daisies on that occasion, and I like to believe

they know it. They certainly look very jolly when I come out, and I

rather fancy the dandelions dig each other in their little ribs when

they see me, and whisper, "Here comes Elizabeth; she's a good sort,

ain't she?"--for of course dandelions do not express themselves very

elegantly.

But nettles are not to be tolerated. They settled the question on which

I had been turning my back for so long, and one fine August morning,

when there seemed to be nothing in the garden but nettles, and it was

hard to believe that we had ever been doing anything but carefully

cultivating them in all their varieties, I walked into the Man of

Wrath's den.

"My dear man," I began, in the small caressing voice of one who has long

been obstinate and is in the act of giving in, "will you kindly

advertise for a head gardener and a proper number of assistants? Nearly

all the bulbs and seeds and plants I have squandered my money and my

hopes on have turned out to be nettles, and I don't like them. I have

had a wretched summer, and never want to see a meek gardener again."

"My dear Elizabeth," he replied, "I regret that you did not take my

advice sooner. How often have I pointed out the folly of engaging one

incapable person after the other? The vegetables, when we get any, are

uneatable, and there is never any fruit. I do not in the least doubt

your good intentions, but you are wanting in judgment. When will you

learn to rely on my experience?"

I hung my head; for was he not in the pleasant position of being able to

say, "I told you so"?--which indeed he has been saying for the last two

years. "I don't like relying," I murmured, "and have rather a prejudice

against somebody else's experience. Please will you send the

advertisement to-day?"

They came in such shoals that half the population must have been head

gardeners out of situations. I took all the likely ones round the

garden, and I do not think I ever spent a more chastening week than that

week of selection. Their remarks were, naturally, of the frankest

nature, as I had told them I had had practically only gardeners'

assistants since I lived here, and they had no idea, when they were

politely scoffing at some arrangement, that it happened to be one of my

own. The hot-beds in the kitchen garden with which I had taken such

pains were objects of special derision. It appeared that they were all

wrong--measurements, preparation, soil, manure, everything that could be

wrong, was. Certainly the only crop we had from them was weeds. But I

began about half way through the week to grow sceptical, because on

comparing their criticisms I found they seldom agreed, and so took

courage again. Finally I chose a nice, trim young man, with strikingly

intelligent eyes and quick movements, who had shown himself less

concerned with the state of chaos existing than with considerations of

what might eventually be made of the place. He is very deaf, so he

wastes no time in words, and is exceedingly keen on gardening, and

knows, as I very soon discovered, a vast amount more than I do, in spite

of my three years' application. Moreover, he is filled with that

humility and eagerness to learn which is only found in those who have

already learned more than their neighbours. He enters into my plans with

enthusiasm, and makes suggestions of his own, which, if not always quite

in accordance with what are perhaps my peculiar tastes, at least plainly

show that he understands his business. We had a very busy winter

together altering all the beds, for they none of them had been given a

soil in which plants could grow, and next autumn I intend to have all

the so-called lawns dug up and levelled, and shall see whether I cannot

have decent turf here. I told him he must save the daisy and dandelion

roots, and he looked rather crestfallen at that, but he is young, and

can learn to like what I like, and get rid of his only fault, a nursery-

gardener attitude towards all flowers that are not the fashion. "I shall

want a great many daffodils next spring," I shouted one day at the

beginning of our acquaintance.

His eyes gleamed. "Ah yes," he said with immediate approval, "they are

_sehr modern."

I was divided between amusement at the notion of Spenser's

daffadowndillies being _modern_, and indignation at hearing exactly the

same adjective applied to them that the woman who sells me my hats

bestows on the most appalling examples of her stock.

"They are to be in troops on the grass," I said; whereupon his face grew

doubtful. "That is indeed _sehr modern_," I shouted. But he had grown

suddenly deafer--a phenomenon I have observed to occur every time my

orders are such as he has never been given before. After a time he will,

I think, become imbued with my unorthodoxy in these matters; and

meanwhile he has the true gardening spirit and loves his work, and love,

after all, is the chief thing. I know of no compost so good. In the

poorest soil, love alone, by itself, will work wonders.

Down the garden path, past the copse of lilacs with their swelling dark

buds, and the great three-cornered bed of tea roses and pansies in front

of it, between the rows of china roses and past the lily and foxglove

groups, we came last night to the spring garden in the open glade round

the old oak; and there, the first to flower of the flowering trees, and

standing out like a lovely white naked thing against the dusk of the

evening, was a double cherry in full bloom, while close beside it, but

not so visible so late, with all their graceful growth outlined by rosy

buds, were two Japanese crab apples. The grass just there is filled with

narcissus, and at the foot of the oak a colony of tulips consoles me for

the loss of the purple crocus patches, so lovely a little while since.

"I must be by myself for once a whole summer through," I repeated,

looking round at these things with a feeling of hardly being able to

bear their beauty, and the beauty of the starry sky, and the beauty of

the silence and the scent--"I must be alone, so that I shall not miss

one of these wonders, and have leisure really to _live_."

"Very well, my dear," replied the Man of Wrath, "only do not grumble

afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose,

and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best

to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal

of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective

punishment."

"Dear Sage," I cried, slipping my hand through his arm, "don't be so

wise! I promise you that I won't be dull, and I won't be punished, and I

will be happy."

And we sauntered slowly back to the house in great contentment,

discussing the firmament and such high things, as though we knew all

about them.

May 15th.--There is a dip in the rye-fields about half a mile from my

garden gate, a little round hollow like a dimple, with water and reeds

at the bottom, and a few water-loving trees and bushes on the shelving

ground around. Here I have been nearly every morning lately, for it

suits the mood I am in, and I like the narrow footpath to it through the

rye, and I like its solitary dampness in a place where everything is

parched, and when I am lying on the grass and look down I can see the

reeds glistening greenly in the water, and when I look up I can see the

rye-fringe brushing the sky. All sorts of beasts come and stare at me,

and larks sing above me, and creeping things crawl over me, and stir in

the long grass beside me; and here I bring my book, and read and dream

away the profitable morning hours, to the accompaniment of the amorous

croakings of innumerable frogs.

Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as

more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was

hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who

loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try

to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the

sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the

happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing

heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have

more ripely considered the thing. He, of course, does not like me as

much as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs produced

by wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get a

match and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which I

wipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told me

that he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is best

to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yet

reached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in its

true character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like to

wipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it were

possible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, I

should also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoes

too, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for this

purpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreau

came back again, and lived for the rest of his days like other people.

During his life, I imagine he would have refused to notice anything so

fatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigned

discourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs

to me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much

and as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his

dearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant

companion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning

hours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it

grieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint

sentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain

bush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and

that I must be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefully

tucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass

to keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine.

"Oh, my dear Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat

of the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you

have flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your

philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that

inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of

allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool

called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the

necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another

way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for

all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left

there, because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit,

which, if not fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance. Yet he is

right; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to

sail by it like Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me,

but there are the babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a

respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which

those dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished

every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so

much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny

morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet,

and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy

of love with life, to come back and live through those dreary luncheon-

ridden hours, when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets

and asparagus and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns his

back on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the

afternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will

not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they

are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a

drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the

grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great

friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be

entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty

tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is

that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I

read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit,

buried in cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with

the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so

much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who asserts

that in the country the only things that make one happy are meals. "I

was happy," he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin in

the Island of Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain,--"I

was happy when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who live

in the country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity of

mind, as well as from the desire of eating." And such is the

perverseness of human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even more

than Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily.

In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am

sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many

lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as

persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual

feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could so

beautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amount

before they can painfully stammer out a sentence that will describe it;

and when they have got it out, how it seems to have just missed the core

of the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it is

of what was perhaps a mighty feeling! I read Goethe on a special seat,

never departed from when he accompanies me, a seat on the south side of

an ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimes

prevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a great

beech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches I

can see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming out

beyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, its

first spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almost

golden backed by a solemn cluster of firs. Here I read Goethe--

everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here

I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I

wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the

complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder

and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the

shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the

opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on

the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from

which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception of

what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not.

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt

Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful

spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,

silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the

beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such

rapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and

trees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all

that breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and

mend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended and

comforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the one

complete and final consolation--before this revelation of yearning,

universal pity, every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.

When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my

drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath

the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take

Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,

and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship,

bearing Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights.

How can I tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is

brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the

elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by

simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have

done with them once and for all.

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and

I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing

returns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have been to come

into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consuming

passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul! I feel I

owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation is

that they too did not care for hats. In the centre of my library there is

a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told,

from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor to

ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books

that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more--all

the books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases round

the walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, and

easiest to get at, are those I love the _best_--the very elect among my

favourites. They change from time to time as I get older, and with years

some that are in the bookcases come here, and some that are here go into

the bookcases, and some again are removed altogether, and are placed on

certain shelves in the drawing-room which are reserved for those that

have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and from whence they

seldom, if ever, return. Carlyle used to be among the elect. That was

years ago, when my hair was very long, and my skirts very short, and I

sat in the paternal groves with _Sartor Resartus_, and felt full of

wisdom and _Weltschmerz_; and even after I was married, when we lived in

town, and the noise of his thunderings was almost drowned by the rattle

of droschkies over the stones in the street below, he still shone forth a

bright, particular star. Now, whether it is age creeping upon me, or

whether it is that the country is very still and sound carries, or

whether my ears have grown sensitive, I know not; but the moment I open

him there rushes out such a clatter of denunciation, and vehemence, and

wrath, that I am completely deafened; and as I easily get bewildered, and

love peace, and my chief aim is to follow the apostle's advice and study

to be quiet, he has been degraded from his high position round the pillar

and has gone into retirement against the wall, where the accident of

alphabet causes him to rest in the soothing society of one Carina, a

harmless gentleman, whose book on the _Bagni di Lucca_ is on his left,

and a Frenchman of the name of Charlemagne, whose soporific comedy

written at the beginning of the century and called _Le Testament de

l'Oncle_, _ou Les Lunettes Cassees_, is next to him on his right. Two

works of his still remain, however, among the elect, though differing in

glory--his _Frederick the Great_, fascinating for obvious reasons to the

patriotic German mind, and his _Life of Sterling_, a quiet book on the

whole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the natural

positions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of genius

writing the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friend

was exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the face

of such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether removed

from Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence at all, unless it be

an eminence, that (happily) crowded bit of ground, where the bright and

courageous and lovable stand together. We Germans have all heard of

Carlyle, and many of us have read him with due amazement, our admiration

often interrupted by groans at the difficulties his style places in the

candid foreigner's path; but without Carlyle which of us would ever have

heard of Sterling? And even in this comparatively placid book mines of

the accustomed vehemence are sprung on the shrinking reader. To the

prosaic German, nourished on a literature free from thunderings and any

marked acuteness of enthusiasm, Carlyle is an altogether astonishing

phenomenon.

And here I feel constrained to inquire sternly who I am that I should

talk in this unbecoming manner of Carlyle? To which I reply that I am

only a humble German seeking after peace, devoid of the least real

desire to criticise anybody, and merely anxious to get out of the way of

geniuses when they make too much noise. All I want is to read quietly

the books that I at present prefer. Carlyle is shut up now and therefore

silent on his comfortable shelf; yet who knows but what in my old age,

when I begin to feel really young, I may not once again find comfort in

him?

What a medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austen

leaning against Heine--what would she have said to that, I wonder?--with

Miss Mitford and _Cranford_ to keep her in countenance on her other

side. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one

that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Here

are Ruskin, Lubbock, White's _Selborne_, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert

Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do

not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver

Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, _Wuthering Heights_, Lamb's _Essays_,

Johnson's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal

Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I

loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French

children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German

children's books, on which I was brought up, with their charming

woodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and good

housemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of the

atmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgments

and rewards in which they lived, and how the _Finger Gottes_ was

impressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most of

the dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and book

about gardens that has been published of late years.

These gardening books are an unfailing delight, especially in winter,

when to sit by my blazing peat fire with the snow driving past the

windows and read the luscious descriptions of roses and all the other

summer glories is one of my greatest pleasures. And then how well I get

to know and love those gardens whose gradual development has been

described by their owners, and how happily I wander in fancy down the

paths of certain specially charming ones in Lancashire, Berkshire,

Surrey, and Kent, and admire the beautiful arrangement of bed and

border, and the charming bits in unexpected corners, and all the

evidences of untiring love! Any book I see advertised that treats of

gardens I immediately buy, and thus possess quite a collection of

fascinating and instructive garden literature. A few are feeble, and get

shunted off into the drawing-room; but the others stay with me winter

and summer, and soon lose the gloss of their new coats, and put on the

comfortable look of old friends in every-day clothes, under the frequent

touch of affection. They are such special friends that I can hardly pass

them without a nod and a smile at the well-known covers, each of which

has some pleasant association of time and place to make it still more

dear.

My spirit too has wandered in one or two French gardens, but has not yet

heard of a German one loved beyond everything by its owner. It is, of

course, possible that my countrymen do love them and keep quiet about

them, but many things are possible that are not probable, and experience

compels me to the opinion that this is one of them. We have the usual

rich man who has fine gardens laid out regardless of expense, but those

are not gardens in the sense I mean; and we have the poor man with his

bit of ground, hardly ever treated otherwise than as a fowl-run or a

place dedicated to potatoes; and as for the middle class, it is too busy

hurrying through life to have time or inclination to stop and plant a

rose.

How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and

spending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floating

leisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hot

scramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at the

vulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring and

unabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are only

pennies, after all--unpleasant, battered copper things, without a gold

piece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and the

hatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of those

above you who have more. And as I perceive I am growing wise, and what

is even worse, allegorical, and as these are tendencies to be fought

against as long as possible, I'll go into the garden and play with the

babies, who at this moment are sitting in a row on the buttercups,

singing what appear to be selections from popular airs.