He found Miss Lammie busy among the rich yellow pools
in her dairy, and went out into the garden, now 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.
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