A GARDEN DIARY 43 



matters to our liking ; that Nature has become 

 our follower ; that our law, not hers, runs through 

 the planet ; that we set the tune, and that she 

 merely plays it. 



Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance ! Put the 

 holder of so untenable a doctrine alone, for 

 ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in 

 the solitary depths of the country, and how soon 

 a perception of his or her own utter transitoriness 

 will begin to break through the thinly formed 

 crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him 

 lift his garden latch, and step out beyond it into 

 the open country. Let him saunter alone in the 

 woods after dusk. Let him walk across the 

 solitary, blackened heather. Let him look down 

 upon the floods, lace-making over the lowlands. 

 Let him without taking so much trouble as this 

 merely lean out of his window after dusk, amid 

 the thickening shadows, and he must be of a 

 remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the 

 sense of his own shadowiness, his own inherent 

 transitoriness, is not the clearest, strongest, and 

 most convincing of all his sensations. 



Thus vanity provides its own solution, and 

 the little inflated soul is driven into puncturing 

 its own proudly swelling balloon. We discover 

 sometimes with no little dismay that it is 

 not alone in our flower-beds that the wild and 

 the tame, the temporary and the permanent, 

 the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub 



