D'ANNUNZIO 309 



tion, and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus becomes a 

 moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning. I 

 shall keep this central truth in mind in these articles. I mean to 

 have a moral garden, if it is not a productive one, one that shall 

 teach, O my brothers ! O my sisters ! the great lessons of life. . . 



This sitting in the sun amid evidences of a ripe year is the 

 easiest part of gardening I have experienced. But what a combat 

 has gone on here ! What vegetable passions have run the whole 

 gamut of ambition, selfishness, greed of place, fruition, satiety, 

 and now rest here in the truce of exhaustion ! What a battle-field, 

 if one may look upon it so ! The corn has lost its ammunition, 

 and stacked arms in a slovenly, militia sort of style. The ground- 

 vines are torn, trampled and withered ; and the ungathered 

 cucumbers, worthless melons, and golden squashes, lie about 

 like the spent bombs and exploded shells of a battle-field. So 

 the cannon-balls lay on the sandy plain before Fort Fisher, after 

 the capture. So the great, grassy meadow at Munich, any 

 morning during the October Fest, is strewn with empty beer- 

 mugs. History constantly repeats itself. There is a large crop 

 of moral reflections in my garden, which anybody is at liberty to 

 gather who passes this way. My Summer in a Garden. 



\A7E walked among evergreens, among ancient box-trees, GABRIELE 

 * * laurels, myrtles, whose wild old age had forgotten its D'ANNUNZIO. 

 early discipline. In a few places here and there was some trace 

 of the symmetrical shapes carved once upon a time by the 

 gardener's shears ; and with a melancholy, not unlike his who 

 searches on marble tombstones for the effigies of the forgotten 

 dead, I noted carefully among the silent plants those traces of 

 humanity not altogether obliterated. A bitter-sweet odour hung 

 round our path, and from time to time one of us, as if wishing to 

 weave afresh an unravelled web, would reconstruct some memory 

 of our far-off childhood. 



