A GARDEN DIARY 9 
a mere rustic landscape, as for a confined one, 
as for a humdrum English one, above all as for 
a landscape within fifty miles of London, why 
the mention of such things merely moved my 
commiseration! Those were the days when to be 
called upon to leave what is sometimes uncivilly 
called the ruder island, and to repair, even 
temporarily, to the more prosperous one, seemed 
a fall and a degradation hardly to be measured 
by words. When the contraction of the horizon 
seemed like a contraction of all life, and of all 
that made life worth having. When the remem- 
brance that one would have to wake in the 
morning with no dim blue line to greet one, 
appeared, to a patriotic, a self-respecting being, 
to be a wrong and an indignity hardly to be 
endured without revolt. 
Such an attitude is, I now hold, inbecomine 
in mere mortals, and, like other vaulting ambitions, 
is apt to precede a fall. The man who starts in 
life determined to be either Cesar, or nothing, 
frequently fails to become Cesar, whereas with 
regard to the other alternative, the gods are quite 
capable of taking him at his word. Happily, 
life is for most of us a liberal education, and the 
narrowing of the horizon comes to be endured 
with a philosophy born of other, and more serious 
deprivations. It may even be open to question 
whether any man or woman ever yet was made 
the better by the possession of a noble view? 
