Cowper's dog had dragged out for him the yellow water-lily that
he could not reach; and in the church itself was a little slab where two
tiny maidens sleep, the sisters of the famous Miss Gunnings, who set
all hearts ablaze by their beauty, who married dukes and earls, and had
spent their sweet youth in a little ruined manor-house hard by. I wonder
whether after all the two little girls, who died in the time of roses,
had not the better part; and whether the great Duchess, who showed
herself so haughty to poor Boswell, when he led his great dancing Bear
through the grim North, did not think sometimes in her state of the
childish sisters with whom she had played, before they came to be laid
in the cool chancel beside the slow stream.

And then we sate down for a little on the churchyard wall, and watched
the water-grasses trail and the fish poise. In that sweet corner of the
churchyard, at a certain season of the year, grow white violets; they
had dropped their blooms long ago; but they were just as much alive as
when they were speaking aloud to the world with scent and colour; I can
never think of flowers and trees as not in a sense conscious; I believe
all life to be conscious of itself, and I am sure that the flowering
time is the happy time for flowers as much as it is for artists.

Close to us here was a wall, with a big, solid Georgian house peeping
over, blinking with its open windows and sun-blinds on to a smooth,
shaded lawn, full of green glooms and leafy shelters. Why did it all
give one such a sense of happiness and peace, even though one had no
share in it, even though one knew that one would be treated as a rude
and illegal intruder if one stepped across and used it as one's own?

This is a difficult thing to analyse. It all lies in the imagination;
one thinks of a long perspective of sunny afternoons, of leisurely
people sitting out in chairs under the big sycamore, reading perhaps,
or talking quietly, or closing the book to think, the memory re-telling
some old and pretty tale; and then perhaps some graceful girl comes out
of the house with a world of hopes and innocent desires in her wide-open
eyes; or a tall and limber boy saunters out bare-headed and flannelled,
conscious of life and health, and steps down to the punt that lies
swinging at its chain--one hears it rattle as it is untied and flung
into the prow; and then the dripping pole is plunged and raised, and the
punt goes gliding away, through zo