IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 213 



household warmth to your home as a pleasant 

 garden. And yet none will be more ready to warn 

 you of the limits of a garden's charms, of its sheer 

 impotence to yield satisfaction at either end of the 

 scale of human joy or sorrow. 



And so it is. Let but the mist of melancholy 

 descend upon you, let but the pessimistic distress to 

 which we moderns are all prone penetrate your 

 mind, let you be the prey of undermining sorrow, or 

 lie under the shadow of bereavement, and it is not to 

 the garden that you will go for Nature's comfort. 

 The chalices of its flowers store not the dew that 

 shall cool your brow. Nay, at times like these the 

 garden poses as a kind of lovely foe, to mock you 

 with its polite reticence, its look of unwavering com- 

 placency, its gentle ecstasy. Then the ear refuses 

 the soft and intimate garden-melodies, and asks 

 instead for the rough unrehearsed music of Nature in 

 the wild, the jar and jangle of winds and tides, the 

 challenge of discords, 



" The conflict and the sounds that live in darkness," 



the wild rhetoric of the night upon some " haggard 

 Egdon," or along the steep wild cliffs when the storm 

 is up, and the deeps are troubled, and the earth 

 throbs and throbs again with the violence of the 

 waves that break and bellow in the caves beneath 

 your feet ; and then it perhaps shall cross your mind 

 to set this brief moment of your despair against the 

 unavailing passion of tides that for ten thousand 

 years and more have hurled themselves against this 



