A GARDEN DIARY 9 



a mere rustic landscape, as for a confined one, 

 as for a humdrum English one, above all as for 

 a landscape within fifty miles of London, why 

 the mention of such things merely moved my 

 commiseration ! Those were the days when to be 

 called upon to leave what is sometimes uncivilly 

 called the ruder island, and to repair, even 

 temporarily, to the more prosperous one, seemed 

 a fall and a degradation hardly to be measured 

 by words. When the contraction of the horizon 

 seemed like a contraction of all life, and of all 

 that made life worth having. When the remem- 

 brance that one would have to wake in the 

 morning with no dim blue line to greet one, 

 appeared, to a patriotic, a self-respecting being, 

 to be a wrong and an indignity hardly to be 

 endured without revolt. 



Such an attitude is, I now hold, unbecoming 

 in mere mortals, and, like other vaulting ambitions, 

 is apt to precede a fall. The man who starts in 

 life determined to be either Caesar, or nothing, 

 frequently fails to become Caesar, whereas with 

 regard to the other alternative, the gods are quite 

 capable of taking him at his word. Happily, 

 life is for most of us a liberal education, and the 

 narrowing of the horizon comes to be endured 



o 



with a philosophy born of other, and more serious 

 deprivations. It may even be open to question 

 whether any man or woman ever yet was made 

 the better by the possession of a noble view ? 



