The Happy Garden 



reasonable to believe that earth and sky are house 

 enough for them. It is hard to relinquish fantasy, 

 hard not to see everything in one's own imperfect 

 human image, and when, on the slope of the hill, 

 I find rows of little mossy cushions, like green 

 buttons, I decide that there has been a Parliament, 

 or an Eisteddfod, or a Revivalist meeting, flinging 

 to the winds the suggestion of reason that things 

 natural have no affairs to discuss, no formal songs 

 to sing, no sins to repent of, and no prayers to say. 

 It is self-flattery perhaps : but more likely the 

 inventions of Puck and Oberon, and Titania, with 

 their very ordinary domestic jealousy, serve only 

 the more easily to express the poet's sense of kin- 

 ship with the trees and all the living things har- 

 boured in their shade. The remembrance of it is 

 comforting food for the natural man or woman 

 who has to bear the burden of the artificial person 

 who rubs along through the surface duties of society # 

 And this is very irritating to Elisabeth, that 

 utilitarian person who, a moment or two ago, 

 demanded the practical service of the winter dish- 

 garden. She has stepped off the paper and taken 

 her place by Jane's side. She has a determined 

 look in her eyes and a faint line about the right 

 corner of her mouth which I do not like, and I 

 hear her saying to Jane : 



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