MIDWINTER GARDENS 



sky-line — keeping a winter share of their 

 feminine grace and softness. We ought to re- 

 tain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, 

 red and yellow stems and twigs and lingering 

 blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaf- 

 lessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to 

 retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers 

 and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and 

 cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, 

 receiving from and giving to them a cheer which 

 neither could have in their frostbound Eden 

 without mutual contrast. 



Eden ! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as 

 to borrow the name of the first gardener's 

 garden for such a shivering garden as this it 

 is because I see this one in a dream of hope — a 

 diffident, interrogating hope — really to behold, 

 some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters 

 as I have never with actual open eyes found one 

 kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen. 

 If I describe it I must preface with all the dis- 

 claimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most 

 venturesome argument goes no farther than 

 "WTiy not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens 



187 



