THIS garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony.
The world holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own people, for verify I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings.London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child in its mother's arms.
When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across the bright grass - IL VERDE SMALTO - to a great red rose bush in lavish disarray against the dark cypress.Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of a solitary paeony; and in lowlier state against the poor parched earth glow the golden cups of the eschseholtzias.
Beyond the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed.Farther off, where the scythe has been busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown lambs; and in the farthest field I can see the great horses moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the silence of the most wonderful nights.I hear the wisdom of the rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin's quaint little summer song.The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under the caves;thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry like the Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a peacock strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodpecker; and at night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in search of prey.
To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and flowers on me as I lie beneath it.Sometimes a bee falls like an over-ripe fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs ere he flies home to discharge his burden.He is too busy to be friendly, but his great velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle rub between his noisy shimmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his own disposal and no responsibilities.
Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they have a starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter.
One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south through the mist.
This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it.Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend their threads again.There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight.Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me;of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God's making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing.Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.
There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the universe, viewed SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS, the Incarnation of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that "all things are ours," yea, even unto the third heaven.
