IO 
THE HEART OF A GARDEN 
Solomon’s Song and the beds of spices when the wind 
blew from Lebanon. 
Dante, whose spirit was of the South, pictured a glacial 
place of terror, and his image of it is horrid enough, in 
all conscience. It smites imagination into shuddering, 
like some dreadful tale of Arctic desolation, or sinister 
histories of frozen ice-bound ships on the high seas. 
And yet, and in spite of all human fears and quakings 
ever inspired by the inhuman sovereignty of the great 
cold, is there not to us of Northern ancestry, of mainly 
Northern blood, a something that goes out joyously, 
with a sting, too, of recognition, to the frank, shrewd 
weather and the first snowfall? It is, in all likelihood, 
a blind survival of an ancient and outworn instinct 
originally barbarous of character, compact of the joy of 
battle and the bitter pleasure of resistance, the strong 
will to live, in short, now merged in milder sentiments 
—flushed warm with the colours of the sunset and stirred 
sharply by the white unearthly beauty of the frost. 
The great post-mundane glories of a new heaven and a 
new earth were prefigured by an oriental imagination, 
but from the pictorial point of view I think a visionary 
might build Paradise enough from a snowclad garden- 
close and a fair sky. “And the twelve gates were twelve 
pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the 
street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent 
glass.” That is the gold of winter itself, gold of ice and 
sunlight, pure gold, as it were transparent glass. 
My hellebores have not disappointed me this year, 
and those which I protected are of especial excellence 
and purity of colour; the milk-white are my favourites 
