THE SOLITARY SUMMER.* THE author of Elizabeth and her German

Garden has written a second book of the same description which is even more charming than the first. Unlike so many of its kind, it is not written to instruct, nor, indeed, for any apparent purpose beyond the wish to talk to sympathetic listeners about her garden, her neighbours, or herself. After reading it we are as ignorant of the nature and growth of plants as, we sus- pect, she is, and the mysteries of domestic economy have not been made any clearer. But in her company we have never been dull, no pages have to be skipped, and the only regret is that there are not more to read.

Those who remember Elizabeth in the German Garden will find her grown more mellow in The Solitary Summer. "The Man of Wrath," too, appears in far more attractive colours. His sarcasm is less biting, and we begin to sus- pect that in real life he is much less " superior " and priggish than be was made to appear in the first book. Even her neighbours, too, are treated more tolerantly ; but as those of her own class are somewhat conspicuous by their absence, it is probable that they may have come to realise that she is a strange bird not quite suited to a German aviary, and one best left to itself. To the ordinary German, or indeed English, county society, Elizabeth may well present a problem difficult to reconcile with any conventional teaching on the ways of woman, and the perversity which makes her wholly charming in the pages of The Solitary Summer cannot fail to be trying to the conventional mind. Then, too, a large sunny estate on the shores of the Baltic, with streams and forests of its own, is not vouchsafed to all. Sordid cir- cumstances in the shape of children clamouring for careers, husbands or wives demanding constant attention, not to speak of the grovelling necessity of making money where- with to feed them, is unfortunately a far more common lot. Should Elizabeth's exclamation—" I want to be alone for a whole summer and get to the very dregs of life. 1 want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow"— escape the lips of one of these unhappy toilers, it is far more likely to be answered by a score of voices : " We too would have life all our own way," than by a kindly " Man of Wrath " saying : " Very well, my dear, only do not grumble afterwards when you find it dull." Still it is a great gain to weary workers that Elizabeths exist who can command a season of leisure. To those struggling with the anxieties of, say, a country parsonage and ten children, or immersed in the busy life of the successful money-making classes, The Solitary Summer will speak of beauty and repose as still existing as part of earth's heritage. With Elizabeth we can " sit amidst the pine-needles of those noble forests which the rain never penetrates, or lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds." We can go with her to the dip in the ryefields where there is "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 with Thoreau as her com- panion she lies upon the grass, and looking down " can see the reeds glistening greenly in the water," and looking up "can see the rye-fringe brushing the sky." Even Thoreau himself could ask for no better spot wherein to "dream away the profitable morning hours to the accompaniment of the amorous croakings of innumerable frogs." In these pages she teaches us the positive value of intercourse with Nature, and the untold mischief of coming to love the fuss and turmoil of which our lives are perhaps inevitably full. We realise that the only attitude which can make such lives noble is patient endurance born of the hope that one day we shall be free to lead the life of Nature,—free to be idle for long hours and not ashamed, free to listen and not to talk, while the voice of wind and water, bird and beast, carries us back to the days of our birth- right, and we hear once more the still small voice of our own heart. Again, in The Solitary Summer we find Elizabeth more * The Solitary Summer. By the Author of Elizabeth and her German Garden. London Macmillan and Co. De.] human than in the German Garden. She has realised that the best of intentions does not always produce success. She has "studied diligently all the gardening books" she could lay hands on, but discovers that "if an ordinarily intelligent person devotes his whole time to studying a subject he loves," healthy lilies and roses do not of necessity follow. The pathetic cry, "The failure of the first two summers had been regarded with philosophy, but that third summer I used to go

into my garden sometimes and cry," must endear her to all would-be gardeners. All garden-lovers know that wild despair of having lost another summer when summers are growing all too few, and that maddening certainty that the

next summer will be no better. Mistakes will again occur, and frost and wind, drought and insects, will fill up the measure of our woe. And yet summer will bring again most of our plant-children, and mistakes are buried in the unexpected, which is more delightful in a garden than anywhere else.

The picture she draws of the peasantry in these far-off Baltic provinces is most unattractive. Not only is their morality of the laxest description, but their ignorance and prejudice is extraordinary. Health and conduct are alike a matter of the simplest animal instincts. Self-will is their sole motive for either living or dying. The orders of doctors are construed into nostrums that gain in proportion to the amount consumed. Consequently, when a bottle of opium with explicit directions as to its use in drops is sent to a poor

woman, she takes it all at once, on the ground that "if it had been any good and able to cure me, the more I took the quicker I ought to have been cured." Naturally, the result was such that no power on earth could persuade her to open her door to any doctor again. The social standing of the inhabitants of the cottages is settled by the size and plumpness of their feather - beds, while fresh air and washing are only suitable to the children of those who have " accumulated vast strength during years of eating only possible to the rich." Their customs, too, are funny in the extreme. It is de rigueur that

the German Frau, be she gentle or simple, should be pro- vided with suitable burial apparel. Even for the humblest cottager this should not consist of less than " a very good

black silk dress and everything to match in good- ness, nice leather shoes, good stockings, and under-things all

trimmed with crochet ; real whalebone corsets, and a quite new pair of white kid gloves." Elizabeth herself, should she die among her retainers, must not hope to escape the custom. "Nothing but a shroud is to be put upon me," she protests; but " such a thing would never be permitted," is the reply.

"The gracious lady may be quite certain that she

will have on her most beautiful ball dress and finest linen, and that the whole neighbourhood shall see for themselves how well Herrschaf ten know what is due to them."

With such aspirations around her we are not surprised that Elizabeth knows " of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden." " How easy," she says, " it would have been to have come into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all- consuming passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul." Books are to her more than human friends in suiting every need and answering every call :- " My morning friend," she says, "turns his back on me when I re-enter 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 the 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 ? ' " In the afternoon she wanders with Goethe, and sheds "invariable tears over Werther," and sits "in amazement before the complications of the Wahlverwandschaften." In the evening, "when everything is tired and quiet," she is with Walt Whitman by the rose-beds, listening "to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell of night, sleep, death, and the stars." Keats goes with her to the forest, and while with Spenser on the Baltic shores the blue waves become to her the "ripples of the Idle Lake." With such friends as these, and a score more, even a hermit's cell would

be peopled with spirits choice and rare. Then there are gardening books of all kinds to turn winter into summer, and she can " wander in fancy down the paths of certain specially charming gardens in Lancashire, Berkshire, and Surrey."

Such is her love for England and English culture that we must take her with a grain when she calls herself a German. Surely the Fatherland does not boast any one so piquant and full of open-air thought.

Elizabeth, too, is fortunate to have a house which she has evidently taught to run by itself. She has as well three charming babes who also run by themselves, full of amusing curiosity for what happened long ago, and what will follow after. The German village schoolmaster called in to wrestle with their active intelligence over Bible history is greeted daily with laughter and posies, and information upon the washing of their beads and the matching of their hair- ribbons :—

Herr Schenk told us to-day about Moses,' began the April baby, making a rush at me.—' Oh ? '—‘ Yes, and a boxer, baser Kiinig, who said every boy must be deaded, and Moses was the allerliebster.'— ' Talk English, my dear baby, and not such a dreadful mixture,' I besought.—` He wasn't a cat.'—` A cat Yes, he wasn't a cat, that Moxs a boy was he:—' But of course he wasn't a cat,' I said with some severity ; ` no one ever supposed he was.'—` Yes, but mummy,' she explained eagerly, with much appropriate hand-

action, the cook's Moses is a cat.'—' Oh, I see. Well ? And he was put in a basket in the water, and that did swim. And then one time they corned, and she said—'—` Who came ? And who said ? '—` Why, the ladies ; and the Konigstorliter said, "Ach Home,

du sehreit so etzvas."'—' In German Yes ; and then they went near, and one must take off her shoes and stockings and go in the water and fetch that tiny basket, and then they made it open, and that kind did cry and cry and strampel so '—here both the babies gave such a vivid illustration of the stranyeln that the verandah shook- ' and see ! it is a tiny baby. And they fetched someb ly to give it to eat ; and the Iiinitistockter can keep that boy, and further it doesn't go.' "

And further we must not go in the sayings of the three babes, though their conversation is very instructive and wholly delightful, except to express a hope that it may be long before they learn to chatter French, or even English, fluently, or have to walk upon "the stony road that leads to Himmel." Long, too, may they hold their own theories of der Lieber Gott, and look for angel wings where feathers never grow. But we hope it will not be long before Elizabeth tells us more about herself and them, and reveals more secrets as to the "art of life" in far-off German lands.