Flowers and Gardens 



but clean and fresh as if new-bathed in 

 milk, and carrying us away to thoughts 

 of dairies, flocks, and pasturage, and the 

 manners of a simple primitive time, some 

 golden age of shepherd-life long since 

 gone by. And this is one of the most 

 intense delights of flowers. They afford 

 such a perfect escape from our artificial 

 nineteenth-century way of living, appear- 

 ing just such a simple unsophisticated race 

 of creatures as we might meet with in a 

 fairy tale. All the restless, uncomfortable 

 passions of constitutions sapped by disease, 

 the vices generated in close-pressed hot- 

 beds of humanity, the anxieties and frauds 

 of the commercial world, seem wholly to 

 have passed away, and we have come 

 into a region where the inhabitants are 

 simple and good, where evil is rare and 

 slight, and not the fast clinging thing we 

 know. And it does not matter at all that 

 the precise historian tells us there never 

 was a golden shepherd age like that 

 which we are visioning. We know well 

 enough that it is so. We know that it 

 supposes incompatible advantages — the 

 good of all seasons in one. But our 

 golden age is real, for it exists now, and 

 in these flowers. And even if we chance 

 to live where rural simplicity is rare, we 



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