IM FRUHLINGSGARTEN 
33 
There is, I know not precisely why, a something 
especially comely and reviving to the senses that exhales 
in the scent of the first spring mowing, even although 
the shearing be accompanied by the prosaic prattle of 
the grass-cutter instead of the slow, shy whispering of 
the scythe, that mysteriously imperative Invitation to 
the Dream. This year our punctuality forestalled the 
scythe, so that I am not to hear that sighing symphony, 
more tuneless than the first autumn notes of the robin 
—the merest shadow of a song, as it were, and yet 
touched to the very tones of the Voice of Strange Com¬ 
mand. I would have liked well to listen for it through 
one of these cold blue twilights ; to hear its low-breathed 
questionings for which there never were, there never 
could be, any answers; and to discover whether it is 
telling the same fairy-tales as once it used, or has for¬ 
gotten them for new ones. But, to be sure, such for¬ 
tuitous delights—and, indeed, I am not so very certain 
as to whether they were real delights or no—could only 
be the fruit of a neglectfulness and lack of method more 
befitting the garden of the sluggard than this trim plea- 
saunce. As it is, all the three lawns are as smooth and 
verdurous as a bowling-green ; the winged white marble 
Sphinx is back in its place upon the grass under the 
great ilex; and I am more than ever heartily agreed with 
Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in his pronouncement 
that nothing is more pleasing to the eye than green 
grass kept finely shorn. 
The birds, with one exception pleasantest of all pos¬ 
sible neighbours, are wonderfully full of affairs; I shall 
be very sensibly duller when they have settled down to 
D 
