Gardens of the Poets 223 
Mary Howitt Garden was planned, full of homely 
old blooms, such as she loves to name in her verse ; 
but it would have slight significance save to its 
maker, since no one cares to read Mary Howitt 
nowadays. In that charming book, Sylvana' s 
Letters to an Unknown Friend (which I know were 
written to me), the author, E. V. B., says, “ The 
very ideal of a garden, and the only one I know, 
is found in Shelley’s Sensitive Plant." With quick 
championing of a beloved poet, I at once thought 
of the radiant garden of flowers in Keats’s heart 
and poems. Then I reread the Sensitive Plant in 
a spirit of utmost fairness and critical friendliness, 
and I am willing to yield the Shelley Garden to 
Sylvana, while I keep, for my own delight, my 
Keats garden of sunshine, color, and warmth. 
That Keats had a profound knowledge and love 
of flowers is shown in his letters as well as his 
poems. Only a few months before his death, when 
stricken with and fighting a fatal disease, he 
wrote : — 
“ How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the 
world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon me ! 
Like poor FalstafF, though I do not babble, I think of 
green fields. I muse with greatest affection on every 
flower I have known from my infancy — their shapes and 
colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with 
a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected 
with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of my 
life.” 
