do the
same for ourselves elsewhere; we must learn to walk alone, not crave,
like a helpless child, to be for ever led and carried in kindly arms.
The danger of culture, as it is unpleasantly called, is that we get to
love things because poets have loved them, and as they loved them;
and there we must not stay; because we thus grow to fear and mistrust
the strong flavours and sounds of life, the joys of toil and
adventure, the desire of begetting, giving life, drawing a soul from
the unknown; we come to linger in a half-lit place, where things reach
us faintly mellowed, as in a vision, through enfolding trees and at
the ends of enchanted glades. This book of mine lays no claim to be a
pageant of all life's joys; it leaves many things untouched and
untold; but it is a plea for this; that those who have to endure the
common lot of life, who cannot go where they would, whose leisure is
but a fraction of the day, before the morning's toil and after the
task is done, whose temptation it is to put everything else away
except food and sleep and work and anxiety, not liking life so but
finding it so;--it is a plea that such as these should learn how
experience, even under cramped conditions, may be finely and
beautifully interpreted, and made rich by renewed intention. Because
the secret lies hid in this, that we must observe life intently,
grapple with it eagerly; and if we have a hundred lives before us, we
can never conquer life till we have learned to ride above it, not
welter helplessly below it. And the cramped and restricted life is all
the grander for this, that it gives us a nobler chance of conquest
than the free, liberal, wealthy, unrestrained life.

In the _Romaunt of the Rose_ a little square garden is described, with
its beds of flowers, its orchard-trees. The beauty of the place lies
partly in its smallness, but more still in its running waters, its
shadowy wells, wherein, as the writer says quaintly enough, are "_no
frogs_," and the conduit-pipes that make a "noise full-liking." And
again in that beautiful poem of Tennyson's, one of his earliest, with
the dew of the morning upon it, he describes _The Poet's Mind_ as a
garden:

In the middle leaps a fountain
Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening
With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder: ...
And the mountain