A GARDEN DIARY 177 



now vividly ; now with a dream-like vagueness ; 

 scenes, some of them, that we have ourselves 

 known, others to which we have only as it were 

 a communal right. Waking hours under the 

 flickering shade of leaves ; life as it was lived in 

 a larger, freer world ; a world without walls or 

 hedgerows ; without sign-posts, or notice-boards ; 

 a world without towns, or smoke ; without dust, 

 or crowds. 



It has been often debated, and not perhaps 

 very profitably, which of two types of men see 

 deepest into that great arcanum of life which we 

 roughly call Nature. Is it the Man of Science, 

 whose business it is to chronicle what he sees 

 and learns, but who must never travel half an 

 inch beyond his brief? who must cling to fact, as 

 the samphire-picker clings to his rope, and never 

 for an instant relax his hold of it? Or is it on 

 the other hand the Singer, who is only too ready 

 to toss all fact to the winds, and to account it 

 mere dust, and dregs and dross, so he can 

 awaken in himself, and pass on to others, some 

 hint, some passing impression, of what he would 

 probably himself call the soul of things ? 



Time was when the barrier between these two 

 types was held to be an absolutely impassable 

 one. We call ours a prosaic age, but it is cer- 

 tainly one of its better points, and a mitigation 

 of that prose, that those barriers hardly appear 

 to us so absolutely impregnable as they once 



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