Rose and passion-flower grown in a careful garden in the sun/' 



ROBERT BUCHANAN. 



JULY 



' / T <V IS Midsummer in the garden and loveliness everywhere ! 

 * As I look from the window upon the many tints of the 

 blossoms, a first thought is of the pleasures that they give us ; 

 and this delight was never more tenderly expressed than by 

 Wordsworth when he wrote : 



" So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive ; 

 Would that the little flowers were born to live 

 Conscious of half the pleasures that they give." 



Robinson, in one of his delightful books " Alpine 

 Flowers " says : " A garden is a beautiful book. Every 

 flower and every leaf is a letter. You have only to learn 

 them and he is a poor dunce that cannot, if he will, do that 

 to learn them and join them, and then go on reading and 

 reading, and you will find yourself carried away from earth 

 by the beautiful story you are going through. You do not 

 know what beautiful thoughts grow out of the ground and 

 seem to talk to a man. And then there are some flowers 

 that seem to me like over-dutiful children : tend them ever 

 so little, and they come up and flourish, and show us, as I may 

 say, their bright and happy faces." But flowers are not the 

 only garden pleasures ; there are the birds 



" These birds have joyful thoughts. 



Think you they sing 

 Like poets from the vanity of song ? 

 Or have they sense of why they sing ? 

 And would they praise the heavens for what they have ? " 



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