THEY who have spent the summer in a garden, with The American Garden as "guide, philosopher, and friend," have missed some of the best things that grew therein if they have gathered only the visible products of the soil. The garden is a great teacher, and all literature is replete with illustrations drawn from it, and from that broader garden in which is comprised all the larger effects of nature.

To cite instances in proof of this would be to give a bibliography of literature, to quote from volume after volume, to cover the whole wide range of poem and story and essay, for all utterances which have been designed to instruct, or to afford pleasure to the cultivated intellect, have almost invariably been compelled to borrow illustrations from the domain of nature, and to seek her aid to "point the moral and adorn the tale".

The Prince among the teachers of men took for his lesson the sowing of the seed, the reaping of the harvest. A Virgil and a Bacon, the first of poets and philosophers, have rendered homage to nature and the garden. Artists must be in touch with the great garden of all animate nature, if they would move the sympathies of men. Millet, the peasant-painter of France, felt this when he said to Sensier: "Some tell me that I deny the charms of the country. I find much more than charms - I find infinite glories. I see, as well as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said that 'Solomon, in all bis glory, was not arrayed like one of these.' I see the halves of dandelions, and the sun also, which spreads out beyond the world its glories in the clouds".

Millet, like all true artists, had a sixth sense - the sense of beauty. This was subject to and controlled by the same impressions and forces that make us cognizant, through the other senses, of pain or pleasure. He felt, and could interpret to others, the beauties of nature. He was able to make people bear "the songs, the silences and murmurings of the air." Millet's testimony regarding these "silent sounds" is worth noting. Some effect to despise this phrase, or at the best only allow the faculty of hearing these voices to be a dreamer's or a poet's privilege. But our own Whitman, who is a poet but no dreamer, of whom a critic has well said that be stands on his own ground with no man his leader as an interpreter of nature, has emphasized this intimacy with one of her phases in the line where he hears:

"The bravuras of birds, the bustle of growing wheat, Gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals".

Virgil's testimony is softer, smoother, less virile, but none the less true when he tells how

"Soft whispers steal along the leafy woods".

At times these voices of nature speak to us with the blare and twang of instruments of brass; again with the silvery, dulcet tones of a lute, an AEolian harp. Now it is the gods in Walhalla sounding the funeral dirge; again the fairies tripping a fantastic measure in the wild wood.

That Whitman was true to nature cannot be better evidenced than by Thoreau's appreciation of his work, for Thoreau was by far the keenest observer of the moods and tenses of nature that the New World has yet known. Possibly, if the professional naturalist is excepted, he takes precedence of all others, here or elsewhere, now or in times past. He did not, like Linnaeus, so minimize the study of nature as to say that a patch of moss no bigger than a man's hand would suffice for the study of a life-time, but he knew where and when the first bud started in the spring - what tree held the last leaf in the autumn. He heard the first notes of the hylodes, the first song of the robin as it came, the harbinger of spring, to the lonely cabin on the shore of Walden pond.

Lonely ! did I say ? Ah ! never was the abode of man less so, for with Thoreau dwelt unceasingly the intimate spirits of the earth and air, and while they told him many of the secrets of their realms, they yet gave him grace to know that more was left untold, so that he did not say with Carlisle :

"It has come about now that the creation of a world is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling".

In contrast to this is Emerson's infinitely truer thought, that * * we learn geology the morning after the earthquake on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea." While the tree is budding, the flower unfolding, we see only the bud and the bloom ; the processes by which nature arrives at its fructification are too deeply hidden to be revealed to the eye of the finite observer. It is true that "we know in part".

Where nature is used as an aid to illustration in literature, it is almost always in her gentler aspect.

"The violets That strew the green top of the new-come spring" make a more seductive picture than the

"-----oak, whose boughs were moss'd with age,

And high top bald with dry antiquity - " albeit a less striking one. Not often is the grinning skeleton exposed, as by Emerson. Less often yet are we shown those phases by which the unsightly ordure of nature - cast off as a worn and worthless garment - becomes re-habilitated into a thing of life and beauty. Carlyle, never long content to dwell upon the purely or ideally beautiful, gives this picture of a battle-field, where

"------The kind seed-field lies a hideous, desolate place of skulls; nevertheless, nature is at work : all that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, absorbed into manure, and next year the March-field will be green - nay, greener. Thrifty, unwearied nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy own, how dost thou, from the very carcass of the killer, bring life for the living ? "

We find this thought also paralleled in Virgil, where "-----th'Enanthian plains once more were strow'd.

With Roman bodies, and just heav'n thought good To fatten twice those fields with Roman blood "

True, it is, that in nature there is no waste. The dry leaf in the forest, the dead body of her great son, Man, are alike food for the building of next year's herbage and fruitage. "The withered leaf is not dead and lost. There are forces in it and around it, though working in inverse order, else how could it rot ? Despise not the rag from which man makes paper, nor the litter from which the earth makes corn".

This idea has been beautifully touched by the graceful pen of Dickens. After the carnage of battle has made havoc of fertile English meadows, he leads us down through the fields that have become green again, where nature, "far above the evil passions of men, soon recovered her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as she had done before, when it was innocent. But there were deep green patches in the growing corn, at first, that men looked at awfully. Year after year they re-appeared, and it was known that underneath those fertile spots heaps of men and horses lay buried, indiscriminately enriching the ground." It is not an unpleasant thought that this tenement of the soul may be made to yield good wholesome corn for the nourishment of other men after we have done with it. Hawthorne has carried the thought farther, and used the poet's license to give it sentiment. In "Septimus Felton," the strange flower Sanguinnia sanguinissima, growing from a grave, contains a vital essence that rightly distilled and compounded becomes an Elixir Vitoe to the seeker after immortality.

It would be difficult to find a literary worker, especially one who has made his personality felt in any degree, who has not testified his love for, or obligation to nature, if not directly, then at least by inference. If be has not gone to the woods and the fields, the mountains and the streams for in-spiration, he has at least asked them for the machinery with which to carry it along, and without which it would have trailed in the dust.

Among the small minority who have not glorified the great god Pan, the gentle Elia must be classed. Lamb loved men and city streets. He hated the country almost as much as he did his desk at the India House. To him a garden was "the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean boldness and felicity, luckily sinned himself out of it".

It is unnecessary to point out the prominence now given by certain writers to verbose descriptions of natural scenery. Half a century ago Carlyle noted the coming wave, and flung his gibe at it. "Sometime before small-pox was extirpated," he says in "Sartor Resartus," "there came a new malady over Europe - I mean the epidemic of view-hunting Poets of old date, being privileged with senses, had also enjoyed external nature, but chiefly as we enjoy the crystal cup which holds good or bad liquor for us. * * * * Never, as I compute, till after the 'Sorrows of Werther' was there man found who would say, 'Come, let us make a description; having drunk the liquor, come, let us eat the glass.' " Yet, after all, this scoffer yielded to the inevitable, as witness the beautiful description of the house-garden where Blumine, the flower-goddess, presided.

In a description of an aspect of nature, the superlative is often given undue prominence by many of our modern story-tellers. They seem trying to emulate the Spaniard that Southey tells about, who always put on his spectacles when about to eat cherries, that they might look bigger and more tempting.

All literature acknowledges the beneficent influences of nature upon the formative character of youth, when the elements are plastic, easily molded. In his "Winter Garden" Kingsley shows the restraining influence that it may have over the developed man. He, too, "had once felt that strange lust after the Burra shikar - the thirst for excitement and venture. But on a little patch of English moor, into which he had struck his roots as firm as the wild fir trees, he had learned the lesson of the old collect to * love the thing which is commanded and desire that which is promised."1

James K. Reeve.