Gardens of the Poets 223 



Mary Howitt Garden was planned, full of homely 

 old blooms, such as she loves to name in her verse ; 

 but it would have slight significance save to its 

 maker, since no one cares to read Mary Howitt 

 nowadays. In that charming book, Sylvand s 

 Letters to an Unknown Friend (which I know were 

 written to me), the author, E. V. B., says, " The 

 very ideal of a garden, and the only one I know, 

 is found in Shelley's Sensitive Plant.' 1 With quick 

 championing of a beloved poet, I at once thought 

 of the radiant garden of flowers in Keats's heart 

 and poems. Then I reread the Sensitive Plant in 

 a spirit of utmost fairness and critical friendliness, 

 and I am willing to yield the Shelley Garden to 

 Sylvana, while I keep, for my own delight, my 

 Keats garden of sunshine, color, and warmth. 



That Keats had a profound knowledge and love 

 of flowers is shown in his letters as well as his 

 poems. Only a few months before his death, when 

 stricken with and fighting a fatal disease, he 

 wrote : — 



" How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the 

 world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon me ! 

 Like poor p'alstaff, though I do not babble, I think of 

 green fields. I muse with greatest affection on every 

 flower I have known from my infancy — their shapes and 

 colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with 

 a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected 

 with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of my 

 life." 



