A GARDEN DIARY 177 
now vividly ; now with a dream-like vagueness ; 
scenes, some of them, that we have ourselves 
known, others to which we have only as it were 
a communal right. Waking hours under the 
flickering shade of leaves; life as it was lived in 
a larger, freer world; a world without walls or 
hedgerows ; without sign-posts, or notice-boards ; 
a world without towns, or smoke; without dust, 
or crowds. 
It has been often debated, and not perhaps 
very profitably, which of two types of men see 
deepest into that great arcanum of life which we 
roughly call Nature. Is it the Man of Science, 
whose business it is to chronicle what he sees 
and learns, but who must never travel half an 
inch beyond his brief? who must cling to fact, as 
the samphire-picker clings to his rope, and never 
for an instant relax his hold of it? Or is it on 
the other hand the Singer, who is only too ready 
to toss all fact to the winds, and to account it 
mere dust, and dregs and dross, so he can 
awaken in himself, and pass on to others, some 
hint, some passing impression, of what he would 
probably himself call the soul of things? 
Time was when the barrier between these two 
types was held to be an absolutely impassable 
one. We call ours a prosaic age, but it is cer- 
tainly one of its better points, and a mitigation 
of that prose, that those barriers hardly appear 
to us so absolutely impregnable as they once 
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