CHAPTER VIII 

 GARDENS IN LITERATURE 



THERE are gardens that owe their sole existence 

 to the pages of a book, and which you enter, 

 not by unlatching a gate or following a path, but 

 by the simple expedient of opening an attractive volume 

 and traveling along lines of print. Gardens, these, that 

 are free to every one, and yet more inviolably secluded 

 than the most solitary place within high walls and jealous 

 hedges; gardens in which you walk alone, safe from 

 invasion by any one alien to your mood or unknown to 

 your desire, and this though thousands may be treading 

 the identical green alley you are at the moment following, 

 or stooping to admire the same pale rose or glowing 



of these gardens in print are very old indeed, 

 others but freshly planted. Among the oldest many are 

 expressed in verse ; for as they grow more modern both 

 the outdoor and the book gardens tend toward a greater 

 freedom than measure and rhyme allow, the former 

 assuming a more natural habit and departing from a 

 fixed symmetry that insisted on doubling every path, 



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