A LL those who have any remembrance of the garden of
their childhood will agree that then they had a far more real possession of it than fifty deeds of ownership could give them now. For one thing, their time in it was reckoned, not by days, but by a3ons. No one remembers the garden of his love very much in wet, unfriendly weather, when his sojourn in it could only be short and disappointing. There were, indeed, a few keen, glorious days of winter, when there were snowmen to make and snowballs to hurl at the massive target of the unintelligent grown-up. But mainly it was summer,—summer days which began as soon as you could escape from nursery clutches into the wonderful fresh morning garden, - which lay all ready for the day of carnival, and ended only when, after a whole-lifetime well worth living, you were dragged, on feet that scraped unwillingly along the gravel, to bed again. Nothing can quite equal the complete happiness of those summer days when they were not marred with too many restraints as to getting one's feet wet. All Nature gets its feet wet with impunity, even the fastidious cat ; and we, who had such a much healthier appetite for the squish of feet in boggy places than that fireside creature, we were condemned to be the solitary and sorry exceptions. However, there were joys enough,—as many as the gods will grant to mortals without jealousy. There was fresh-cut grass to play in till you were constrained to jump with fearful violence to shake out as far as might be the blades which made so tickly a lining to your clothes. There was the awing, whence you could catch triumphant glimpses of spires and tree-tops invisible from the tame levels of the lawn, till ecstasy passed into that birth of boredom which is the beginning of sea-sickness. And then, when you had passed through the horrid ordeal of washing and brushing, and had endured the culpable waste of time involved by having dinner indoors, you could, if you were lucky, escape out into the land of afternoon, a land now ten- fold your own. For now is the time when drowsiness and sleep descend upon all creatures : the hens scrape less pur- posefully in the poultry-yard, or sit down, fluffy and extensive, and drawl sleepy confidences, and dream of hatching eggs.
Down by the byre the red cow folds under her ample body the legs that look so insufficient, and embeds herself in the deep clover to chew the cud, and would attain to the abstrac- tion of Nirvana but for the flies that settle on her moist, black nose. In the stables the almost untiring sh—sh of cleaning flags at last into silence; and the great cat, which lives much in the garden and seeks for birds, stretches himself, filled with his ill-gotten gains, on the pavement of the sunny yard, and surrenders himself to sleep in that masterly abandon of com- fort which makes him, for all purposes of his, a king in the earth. But more significant than all this, the million eyes of the grown-up droop and shut; by the open nursery window,
where even "E says to me and I says to says
"is hushed ; and in that dim mystery of dulness called the study, where the study-smell of old books and old leather chairs hangs heavily on the hot air. But best of all, he whose headquarters are in the potting-shed, and whose battlefield is everywhere, closes those ever-counting, un- forgiving eyes of his, and the voice which so often rang suddenly across the strawberry-beds like the very trump of doom is sunk in the mellow music of a snore. And around it all go on those sweet indeterminate harmonies, like a great orchestra playing very softly, so that we must listen to hear, —the sound of soft airs in the trees and in the orchard grass, and the sleepy twittering of birds, and the voice of some far-off restless dog, and the sound of a horse's feet coming faintly from the road. And you could lie blissfully there, with half your body under the strawberry nets, with the hot smell of net and earth and strawberries all around, in one enwrapping luxury, till either prudence or discovery drove you hence sad or glad, as your fate had been.
But there were, after all, other and less sinful joys than this. There were cadences of this summer music which found answer in some inner chord that later loses its fine faculty, a strange consciousness of oneness with all the world around; strange to look back on, but not strange then ; never formu- lated, only felt. Everything, the buttercups in the grass, the bluebells in the copse, a bed of cabbages or rhubarb lying in the sunshine,—all had a clear and immediate significance of their own. There was no definite recognition of mystic meaning in it, none of that symbolism which is the best that the average grown-up mind can make of Nature. The child's mind is not detached enough from its object to find in it any meaning which it could formulate ; their very oneness forbids that. And perhaps the joy itself must remain, as it always was, wordless. But in those years there certainly was an all-absorbing happiness—perhaps there is no better word for the tyranny of feeling which held one—in the presence of a wood in its summer glory, which never comes in its fulness afterwards.
It is not all loss, for we apprehend it in new ways instead ; but unquestionably that intimate companionship between oneself and Nature is lost. We are busy with thoughts about the beauty, about a painter's rendering of it, or about a poet's interpretation of it, or about the structure of the tree-stems. We take a book of verse with us, and look at the wood with some one else's eyes; or we take an abridged work on "British Blossoms," and hunt madly for the counterparts of its coloured plates. In all these ways does our complex, didactic, parable-seeking, cut-and-dried grown-up conscious- ness occupy itself when it is face to face with the mystery of a wood, and it is doubtless all very good. But it is all poor, and thin, and small, and cold compared to one's realisation of that mystery twenty or thirty years before. A copse of young trees, its floor lighted by flecks from slanting beams that made the spring grass shine transparent; armies of blue- bells and cowslips and clumps of primroses growing all around, and stretching back into the depths of the wood where the trees met and hid each other; the voice of a thrush coming out of the cloud of green ; and a mossy seat cut by some earlier dweller,—what more, in our eyes, could the angels want in Paradise ? There was end- less employment, of course, in digging other seats, in sailing things on the stream, and in countless other ways ; but each borrowed half its joy from this wonderful atmo- sphere of dancing light and shadow, of fairy green, and of massed flowers. The beasts that belonged to the wood and the pond also bred delight beyond description. There were newts and tadpoles to catch; there were scores of baby frogs for whose sake you had to go delicately over the light-pat- terned velvet moss of the path; there were dragon-flies in whose pursuit you extinguished the frogs in most unseemly quantity.
Time has shut the gates to the heart of the wood and changed the key of its music. And if we now hunt bigger game, and if not all the magic of the land of faery can make us leave the chase to turn back and listen to its songs again, still we remember, and we say:— " So swetely they played And sang all the way
That it a heaven was to heave."
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