1 78 A GARDEN DIARY 



were. If we have never seen a great scientist 

 combined with a great poet it is at least not in- 

 conceivable that the world may some day behold 

 such a combination. Even within the generation 

 just over, and in utilitarian England, there have 

 been one or two men who have given us at all 

 events an inkling of so desirable a possibility. 



Given a mind that can feed on knowledge, 

 without becoming surfeited by it ; a mind to 

 which it has become so familiar that it has grown 

 to be as it were organic ; a mind for which facts 

 are no longer heavy, but light, so that it can play 

 with them, as an athlete plays with his iron balls, 

 and send them flying aloft, like birds through 

 the air. Given such a mind, so fed by know- 

 ledge, so constituted by nature, and it is not easy 

 to see limits to the realms of thought and of 

 discovery, to the feats of reconstruction, still more 

 perhaps to the feats of reconciliation, which may 

 not, some day or other, be open to it. 



