The Fairy Gardens. January 9.
Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid the pomp of Nature’s ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the “Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day.”
Glaucus. 1855.
Love. January 10.
Oh! Love! Love! Love! the same in peasant and in peer! The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind, a dreamer, an exaggerator—a liar, in short! They just know nothing about you, then. You will not see people as they seem—as they have become, no doubt; but why? Because you see them as they ought to be, and are in some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created them!
Two Years Ago, chap. xiv. 1856.