36 MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN. 



of an unregulated life. I put up the most at 

 tractive sort of poles for my Limas. They 

 stand high and straight, like church-spires, in 

 my theological garden, lifted up ; and some 

 of them have even budded, like Aaron s rod. 

 No church-steeple in a New-England village 

 was ever better fitted to draw to it the rising 

 generation on Sunday y than those poles to lift 

 up my beans towards heaven. Some of them 

 did run up the sticks seven feet, and then strag 

 gled off into the air in a wanton manner ; but 

 more than half of them went galivanting off to 

 the neighboring grape-trellis, and wound their 

 tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a 

 disregard of the proprieties of life which is a 

 satire upon human nature. And the grape is 

 morally no better. I think the ancients, who 

 were not troubled with the recondite mystery of 

 protoplasm, were right in the mythic union of 

 Bacchus and Venus. 



