A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN 



and very frankly give them fruit for their 

 songs." 



Wordsworth, we know, kept such trysts 

 with plants, and in our own land Hawthorne 

 knew when to go to the haunts of bogarethums 

 almost as surely as Emerson's feet were led to 

 the rhodoras. Thoreau knew by high instinct 

 as well as by long experience when and where 

 to find every growing thing in that wonderful 

 little world about Concord in which, he tell us, 

 11 1 have travelled a great deal," and of which 

 he has made citizens every one who loved his 

 mistress Nature. 



Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth had 

 each a golden word for every flower they 

 knew. The daisy belonged to them and to 

 Burns, as I have said ; and to Sir Walter the 

 bracken, the harebell and the heather were a 

 part of the caller air of Scotland. Miss Austen 

 had a quiet liking for the trim Georgian gar- 

 dens, walled in and sweet with roses and laven- 

 der but she, as well as her sprightly sister, Miss 

 Ferriers, were too busy with men and women 

 to care overmuch about things inanimate, a 

 trait showed by Miss Bronte and George Eliot, 

 in a degree. So was Thackeray, who had 



