14 A TOUK ROUND MY GARDEN. 



There all things ajre the reverse of those which we see 

 every day; all the treaWes of the earth, all dignities crowded 

 together, would be but ojaeots of ridicule, if there offered in 

 exchange for a faded flower, or jm old glove, left in a honey- 

 suckle arbour. But why do 1 talk about honeysuckles? 

 Why I am forced to give the names of flowers you know to 

 the flowers of these charming regions? In this country no 

 one believes in the existence of perfidy, inconstancy, old age, 

 death, or fprgetfulness, which is the death of the heart. Man 

 there requires neither sleep nor food; an old wooden bench 

 is there a thousand times more soft than eider-down else- 

 where ; slumbers are there more calm and delicious, constantly 

 attended by blissfuljdreams. The sour sloe of the hedges, 

 the insipid fruit of the bramble, there acquire a flavour so 

 delicious that it wotlld be absurd to compare them to the 

 pine-apple of other regions. Life is there more mildly happy 

 than dreams can aspire to be in other countries. Go, then, 

 and seek these poetic isles ! 



Alas! in reality, it was but a poor little garden, in a mean 

 suburb, when I was eighteen, in love, and when she would 

 steal thither for an instant, at sunset I 



So loved I a little shut-up garden. 



After aU, is this life anything but a terrible journey, 

 without repose, and with but one common end in view? Is 

 it anything more than arriving successively at various ages, 

 and taking or leaving something at each? Does not all that 

 surrounds us change every year? Is not every age a different 

 country? You were a child; you are a young man; you 

 may become an old man. Do you believe you shall find as 

 much difference between two persons, however remote from 

 each other they may be, as between you a child and you an 

 old man ? 



You are in childhood; — the man is there with his fair hair, 

 his bold, limpid glance, and his light and joyous heart; he 

 loves every one, and every one seems to love him; everything 

 gives him something, and everything promises him still much 

 more. There is nothing which does not pay him a tribute of 

 joy, nothing which, for him, is not a plaything. The butter- 

 flies in the air, the bluebottles in the corn-fields, the sand of 

 the sea-shore, the herbage of the meadows, the green alleys of 



