APOLOGY xix 



at any hour, and point them out to others, if 

 I please ? Why, if I may not have sight of 

 garden joys, may I not have faith that some- 

 where they exist ; hope that some time they 

 may be mine again, and love that shall carry 

 me bravely through a whole year of imagined 

 beauty ? 



I will have a garden ! Reams of paper shall 

 be my acreage, and pen and ink shall be my 

 spade and trowel. Never a blight shall fall 

 on my flowers, nor shall they suffer an un- 

 welcome rain, or an untimely frost. It shall 

 be here to-day, and there to-morrow : an old 

 pleasaunce which I remember, in one hour, and 

 in the next, a new realm untrodden by the foot 

 of man. If I choose, the whole landscape shall 

 be my garden, or it may be an orchard, or a 

 field of clover, of bending wheat. If I like, it 

 shall be a marsh, hot in the sunshine, and full 

 of strange bog-growths, or it shall be a forest, 

 vast and dim and inscrutable. Perhaps it will 

 narrow down to the shadow cast by a pot of 



