IM FRUHLINGSGARTEN 
27 
you of winter work and laborious days of trenching and 
potting and so forth, it is—unless you should chance to 
have a passion for alterations—as though your garden 
were a comrade estranged, “ a field reaped and gleaned, 
a church where no man comes to pray.” The winter 
is old, and it is a silence as of age and death that 
enchains your pleasaunce for so many months. But the 
Sleeping Beauty is awake at last, and the spring sun is 
her prince. And, after all, it may be that this season 
owes something of its incommunicable charm to a sense 
of contrast. There is somewhat, as it were, of the 
thrill of convalescence that adds intensity to these first 
moments of release from the valley of the shadow of 
winter. You are on the mild upward slope, and joy is 
in the ascent: satisfaction there may be on the summit; 
but this is pure gold. 
“ He that has two cakes of bread, let him sell one 
of them for some flower of the narcissus,” said the 
Prophet; “ for bread is the food of the body, but 
narcissus is food for the soul.” And as I survey with 
complacence and some little measure of honest pride 
my turf-hemmed border beneath the long-armed es¬ 
paliers, this doctrine seems sounder than ever, for it is 
filled from rim to rim with row upon row of flowers or 
the narcissus, fragrant as the Spice Islands, and coloured 
like amber and ivory. On either side of the many- 
flowered Tazettas, with their small lemon cups and 
pearly petals, divinely aromatic and largely liberal or 
scent and blossom, nod long lines of heavier-headed 
flowers. Here bloom in perfumed beauty the three 
best kinds of double-flowered narcissus or Peerless 
