“FAIR QUIET” 
ARTHUR W. COLTON 
Author of “Harps Hung Up in Babylon,’’ “The Delectable Mountains,” and other books. 
Articles by Mr. Colton may be found in January, March, and April 1922, and October 1923 
Garden Magazine as well as in a number of other publications 
The Garden as an Out-of-doors Home where Men 
Foregather with Flowers, Peace, and Friendship 
HE garden is coming to seem to more and more of us a 
place to live in, to sit down in, and meditate on things, 
ISIS and have unhurried conversations with unhurried 
friends; an out-of-doors home, a happy blending of 
nature and humanity, where things that grow out of the brown 
earth and things that grow out of the gray matter of men’s 
brains, natural forces and human contrivances, flowers and 
friendships, green leaves and wayward fancies, come together 
on a common ground of mutual understanding, to the better¬ 
ment of both. 
The story of gardens is a long story, and in the main they 
have always had something to do with the idea of refuge. 
Culturally and horticulturally we come from the Near East by 
way of the Mediterranean. Hither Asia is dry and hot, and 
even Mediterranean coasts are relatively so. Our Roses and 
Peaches and so on seem to have come from China by way of 
the gardens of old Persia, where the refuge primarily sought 
was from the desert’s heat. Fountains and shade were the 
first desires and ruling motives, yet nowhere has open air seclu¬ 
sion been so universally demanded as in the Near East, where 
men clustered in cities, but built their houses around inner 
courts and cloisters. The Roman atrium and peristyle were 
open air living rooms, inner courts half roofed toward the center, 
and under this unroofed center was always a fountain or pool, 
and probably something green and growing. 
At any rate, whether cloistral, or of terraced outlook, or 
walled, or hedged, the garden has always been a place of cool 
water and green leaves, in some degree of ordered planning and 
attendance; and even more than a place to dig and plant— 
very noticeably more in its actual history—it has been a place 
to live in, and find peace there, with private thoughts and 
familiar friends. 
Andrew Marvell is supposed to have written his poem, 
“The Garden,” in Latin first, and then translated it. I do not 
know on what the supposition is based, for the two were 
first printed together in 1681 ; but Latin poetry in the 17 th 
century could still be written with gusto, and Marvell is as 
freehanded with it as his friend Milton. Still the English 
version is more useful to us. It is perhaps the most celebrated 
and probably the best poem on gardens in the language. 
Marvell’s garden included an orchard, and seems to have been 
largely informal: 
"The nectarine and curious peach 
Into my hands themselves do reach; 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared in flowers, I fall on grass.” 
The only artificial formality in Marvell’s garden, specifically 
mentioned, was a flower dial; it was no “yea-forsooth precisian” 
of a garden: 
“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, 
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root, 
Casting the body’s vest aside, 
My soul into the boughs does glide; 
there like a bird it sits and sings, 
Then whets and claps its silver wings.” 
Was there ever a more birdlike fancy, more light, lilting, un¬ 
expected and off-on-the-instant with a flit of wing? 
“Such was that happy garden-state. 
While man there walked without a mate 
Two paradises ’twere in one 
To live in paradise alone.” 
But Eden, according to the specifications, was hardly a garden 
at all, and—for a counter-irritant to Marvell’s doctrine that the 
ideal “garden-state” was proper only to solitary bachelors—a 
contemporary of his may be quoted, one Abraham Cowley, who 
wrote a poem of the same title, nearly as good, and addressed to 
another lover of gardens and trees, John Evelyn, commending 
his wisdom in the art of living: 
"In books and gardens thou has placed aright 
Thy noble innocent delight.” 
And especially for his association of Madam Evelyn with that 
delight, finding thereby: 
“The fairest garden in her looks, 
And in her mind the wisest books.” 
There is no magic in Cowley’s poem, as there is in Marvell’s, 
which is fruity, fragrant, and many colored; but the presiding 
genius of both and the burden of their song is “alma quies et 
germana quietis, simplicitas,” fair Quiet and her sister, Inno¬ 
cence. It is the feeling of Horace for his Sabine form, and of 
Chaucer’s: 
“ Flee from the press and dwell with the soothfastness, 
Suffice thee thy good, though it be small.” 
It is weariness of cities and contentious ambition. Marvell was 
a member of Parliament, and Cowley a disappointed place 
hunter. Evelyn kept a diary, which is not as entertaining as 
that of his friend Pepys, wrote a book on trees called “Silva,” 
rented his Sayes Court place at one time to Peter the Great of 
Russia, who used to ride horseback through the clipped hedges. 
His ancestral seat, Wotton House in Surrey, is still in the family, 
or was twenty years or more ago, when I came down behind it 
from Leith Hill and noted that the reigning Sir John Evelyn kept 
kangaroos instead of deer. All three, the two poets and the 
gentlemanly diarist, were men of affairs, familiar with courts 
and councils, with hard pavements and hurrying crowds, with 
tumult and intrigue and heart burning. A garden represented 
a refuge from these things and their antithesis —alma quies, 
consoling peace, senses soothed with fragrance and beauty and 
the songs of birds, and hours moving slowly to a flower dial in¬ 
stead of the nervous jigging of a clock. Something of this kind 
too it represents to those garden lovers of our generation who 
have interest in more things than digging and planting and the 
breeding of prize Roses. 
Marvell translated his “Alma Quies” as “Fair Quiet”; but 
his Latin was better than his English adjective, for “alma” does 
not mean “fair.” It means much more in respect to gardens. 
It means nourishing, cherishing, restoring, genial, bountiful, and 
the like. It is the epithet associated with the deities of earth 
and sunlight, the harvest and the vintage. It means here the 
effect which the quiet of gardens has on tired nerves and the de¬ 
pression born of the flight of years; because nature brings there 
her leisure, strength, and imperturbable beauty, each year 
imperturbably reborn, and lends them to the ends of human 
contrivance; and the daily companionship of these things makes 
in some secret fashion for the restoration of confidence in the 
universe and content with one’s personal destiny there. 
There are therefore, it may be not too fancifully argued, two 
spirits which brood beneficently over gardens; one of them is 
this “Alma Quies” and the other is the spirit of a long tradition, 
the subsidence and memorial remainder of old happiness left 
behind by forgotten generations. 
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