Top-heavy civilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after the "primitive" and the "elemental." Weary capitalists and professional men play--expensively--at what when all's said is but a child's game of ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.
Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered, in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep. But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration. To see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope. There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into an indulgence.