extreme art and infinite patience; the result, a rainbow stream of colour
through the working year.

He added a few foreign growths: cyclamen for the woods, because he did not
see how one could do without them who had once seen them in Calabria; wild
gladiolus, because it loved the corn, and there was land in tillage within
a mile of him; a few primulas for his conduit's edges; wild crocus,
because She whom he had loved best had loved them; colchicums for the
bottoms in Autumn, because once She, straying with him in meadows, had
picked some for her bosom and at parting given him one. He had it still,
though he never cared to look at it. She and it belonged to his first
volume, and neither crocus nor colchicum had been added at the date of
which I write. He planted them when he reopened that book, and they are
thriving now.

Here was work enough for a man somewhat mauled by the world to forget his
hard knocks withal; and he forgot them. Looking about him, the length and
breadth of his silent and lonely valley, he could see nothing but amenity
in the earth which owed man so little. It was so with him at this time
that the more he saw to love in Nature the less he could find admirable in
man, who denied her at every turn. It was men, not She, who had given him
his bruises; it was She, not men, who had taught him how to forget them.
When outraged Society cried him down for a breaker of laws, he had replied
that, so far as he knew, he had broken none of Nature's; and had it been
argued that we live otherwise than as the beasts that perish, he would
have retorted, "Whether the beasts perish or not, it is very clear that
they live to the full in this world, and that we don't. Suppose they
perish, at least they have lived. If we are to live hereafter, as to which
no one is certain, we are faced at our temporal death with the fact that,
born into this world with certain faculties, instincts, appetites, and