82 A GARDEN DIARY 
weather to revert to an older, and a wilder con- 
dition. Snow admittedly recreates everything ; 
our most familiar paths and shrubberies, nay our 
very stable runnels, growing quite arctic and 
hyperborean-looking under its disguise. Apart 
from snow, the same impression is produced 
by any really strong atmospheric variation. 
Crackling grass, and glittering ice-bound trees, 
awaken one set of suggestions. Roaring winds, 
a drenched earth, and inky clouds tumbling 
wildly over the sky, arouse quite others. Even 
objects inside the garden, plants that have been 
perhaps put there by one’s own hands; clumps 
say, of bamboos and reedy grasses—Arundo 
donax or the like—assume suddenly new, and 
slightly savage aspects when one sees them 
sweeping to and fro, or buckling like so many 
fishing rods under the lash of a sudden tempest. 
The commonplace is not really unescapable, 
though it often seems as though it were. 
There are wider, freer notes, which only need 
awakening to stir, and thrill us with their 
presence. The imagination leaps to meet them, 
and feels them to be its right. For we are all 
heirs to a large inheritance, though we are apt, 
as a rule, to be forgetful of the fact. 
