The Happy Garden 



a true tale of love, and many, many a foolish one. 

 The joy of blue delphiniums is proof against dull 

 care, and the peevish boredom of the grey, damp, 

 English winter vanishes with the first peeping 

 snowdrop. 



The happiness of a garden shall be judged by 

 the joy of the flowers. Do they grow in great 

 masses unhampered and untrammelled ? You 

 shall know that in mind and heart the gardener 

 was free to feel the loveliness of their glowing life. 

 Do they grow stiffly, and according to some pattern 

 formalised by books and convention ? Then the 

 gardener has felt no kinship with them and his 

 plot of land has brought him no more delight than 

 a chess-board. He has been playing a game to 

 fill idle hours, and the flowers are not in his life, 

 but outside it, and serve no purpose higher than 

 that of a spectacle or gallanty show. 



Garden and gardener act and react upon each 

 other, and the tending and cultivation of flowers 

 is^ as self-revealing, and therefore dangerous to 

 tackle, as any other art : for it is an art, as even 

 so respectable a poet as Wordsworth has witnessed : 



" Its object, like that of all the liberal arts, 

 is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the 

 control of good sense." 



My flowers are my friends, and I am loath to 

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