178 A GARDEN DIARY 
were. If we have never seen a great scientist 
combined with a great poet it is at least not in- 
conceivable that the world may some day behold 
such a combination. Even within the generation 
just over, and in utilitarian England, there have 
been one or two men who have given us at all 
events an inkling of so desirable a possibility. 
Given a mind that can feed on knowledge, 
without becoming surfeited by it; a mind to 
which it has become so familiar that it has grown 
to be as it were organic; a mind for which facts 
are no longer heavy, but light, so that it can play 
with them, as an athlete plays with his iron balls, 
and send them flying aloft, like birds through 
the air. Given such a mind, so fed by know- 
ledge, so constituted by nature, and it is not easy 
to see limits to the realms of thought and of 
discovery, to the feats of reconstruction, still more 
perhaps to the feats of reconciliation, which may 
not, some day or other, be open to it. 
