The green, grassy, deeply-shadowed lawn
lay behind the mansion, sloping down into a dark, deep dell, across
which brawled a tiny brook long since absorbed by the thirsty earth
thrown out from many foundations of stores and tenements and great
warehouses hard by; a dell where once roses, lilacs, guelder-globes, and
calacanthus-bushes, grew with a vigor that I have nowhere seen
surpassed.
It was not much the fashion then to have rare garden-flowers. Our
conservatory contained a fair array of these, but we had beds of tulips,
hyacinths, and crocuses, basking in the sunshine, and violets and lilies
lying in the shadow such as I see rarely now, and which cost us as
little thought or trouble in their perennial permanence, whereas the
conservatory was an endless grief and care, although superintended by a
thoroughly-taught English gardener, and kept up at unlimited expense.
My sister--for so I was taught to call Evelyn Erle--revelled in this
floral exclusiveness, but to me the dear old garden was far more
delightful and life-giving. I loved our sweet home-flowers better than
those foreign blossoms which lived in an artificial climate, and
answered no thrilling voice of Nature, no internal impulse in their
hot-house growth and development. What stirred me so deeply in April,
stirred also the hyacinth-bulb and the lily of the valley deep in the
earth--warmth, moisture, sunshine and shadow, and sweet spring rain--and
the same fullness of life that throbbed in my veins in June called forth
the rose.
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