in the height of its summer.
Great cabbage roses hung heavy-headed splendours towards purple-black
heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies
mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the
narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into
the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a
lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God.
His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's
neglected garden blossomed into higher glory in his soul. The bloom and
the richness and the use were all there; but instead of each flower was
a delicate ethereal sense or feeling about that flower. Of these how
gladly would he have gathered a posy to offer Miss St. John! but,
alas! he was no poet; or rather he had but the half of the poet's
inheritance--he could see: he could not say. But even if he had been
full of poetic speech, he would yet have found that the half of his
posy remained ungathered, for although we have speech enough now to be
'cousin to the deed,' as Chaucer says it must always be, we have not
yet enough speech to cousin the tenth part of our feelings. Let him who
doubts recall one of his own vain attempts to convey that which made
the oddest of dreams entrancing in loveliness--to convey that aroma of
thought, the conscious absence of which made him a fool in his own eyes
when he spoke such silly words as alone presented themselves for the
service. I can no more describe the emotion aroused in my mind by a
gray cloud parting over a gray stone, by the smell of a sweetpea, by
the sight of one of those long upright pennons of striped grass with
the homely name, than I can tell what the glory of God is who made these
things. The man whose poetry is like nature in this, that it produces
individual, incommunicable moods and conditions of mind--a sense of
elevated, tender, marvellous, and evanescent existence, must be a poet
indeed. Every dawn of such a feeling is a light-brushed bubble rendering
visible for a moment the dark unknown sea of our being which lies beyond
the lights of our consciousness, and is the stuff and region of our
eternal growth. But think what language must become before it will tell
dreams!--before it will convey the delicate shades of fancy that come
and go in the brain of a child!--before it will let a man know wherein
one face differeth from another face in glory! I susp