A GARDEN DIARY 43 
matters to our liking; that Nature has become 
our follower ; that our law, not hers, runs through 
the planet; that we set the tune, and that she 
merely plays it. 
Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance! Put the 
holder of so untenable a doctrine alone, for 
ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in 
the solitary depths of the country, and how soon 
a perception of his or her own utter transitoriness 
will begin to break through the thinly formed 
crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him 
lift his garden latch, and step out beyond it into 
the open country. Let him saunter alone in the 
woods after dusk. Let him walk across the 
solitary, blackened heather. Let him look down 
upon the floods, lace-making over the lowlands. 
Let him—without taking so much trouble as this 
—merely lean out of his window after dusk, amid 
the thickening shadows, and he must be of a 
remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the 
sense of his own shadowiness, his own inherent 
transitoriness, is not the clearest, strongest, and 
most convincing of all his sensations. 
Thus vanity provides its own solution, and 
the little inflated soul is driven into puncturing 
its own proudly swelling balloon. We discover 
—sometimes with no little dismay—that it is 
not alone in our flower-beds that the wild and 
the tame, the temporary and the permanent, 
the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub 
