So may trees be a solace in trouble, and secrets may be whispered to bushes of Rosemary and Lavender, who will yield their secret solace of peace, as the tree yields strength. All these things are written in a garden in coloured letters of gold, and green, and crimson, in blue and purple, orange and grey, and they are written for a purpose. And a man may seek diligently for the secret of this great book and find nothing if he seek with his head alone. He will tell of the growth of trees, their years, their nature, their sickness. He will learn of the power of the sap which flows down from the tips of leaves to the great tree roots all snug in the soil; and he will learn of the veins in the leaves, and the properties of the gum of the bark, yet will he never learn that of which the tree speaks always, night and day—praising.
Of what is the colour of green that the earth’s best page is made of it? Of what is the colour of young green that it brings, unbidden, tender thoughts? It is more than the gold of Corn, and the brown of ploughed earth, and the glory of flowers. By it comes peace to the eyes, and through the eyes to the heart of man, so that men say of youth and the times of youth that they are salad days; and of old age, if so be it is a fine old age, that it is green. It is the colour of the body as blue is the colour of the soul. The sky and the sea are blue, and they are things of mystery, deep and profound, and because of their great depth and profundity they are blue. The grass and the trees, and the leaves of flowers, and blades of young Corn are green. They are mysterious things but they are nearer to man, and he has them to his hand to be near them, and get quick comfort of them.
And Daisies are the stars of the grass, as stars are the Daisies of Heaven; and if a man look long at the stars set out orderly in the sky he may become fearful, for God may seem far off and difficult; yet if he be near he may pick a Daisy and take his fill of comfortable things, for God will seem near and His voice in the Daisy.
Yet many a man will walk over a field of grass pressing the Daisies with his feet, and take no heed of them, or of the stars over above his head; and the night and the day will be to him but light and darkness, and the stars but lanterns to show him home, and the Daisies but flowers of the field. But if he be a man who sees all, and in everything can feel the finger and pulse of God, his staff will blossom in his hand, and he will go on his way rejoicing.
In this way can man regard the trees in his garden, and speak with them, loving them, and learning of them, for learning is all of love. And he may yet be an ordinary man, not poet, or artist, but he must be mystic because he has the true sight. Many a man, stockbroker, clerk, painter, labourer, soldier, or whatever he seems to be, has his real being in these moments, and they are revealed through love or sorrow, but not by hard learning or text-books.
III
A LOVER OF GARDENS
There are many who say this and that of Sir John Mandeville, his Travels; that he was not; that he was a Frenchman; that no one knows who he was. For years he was to me an English Knight who lived at St. Albans, and from there set out to travel over all the world seeking adventure, and relating the peculiarities of his journey in fascinating, if slightly imaginative, language. I rejoiced when he saw a board from the Noah’s Ark, when he talked with the Cham of Tartary; and told of the wonders of Ind. But comes along this and that expert who upset the figure of the gallant Knight, and heave him from horse to ground as a dummy figure, and burn him for firewood as a fallen idol. And why? It appears that Sir John is no more a real being than Homer, or Æsop, or any other of those personal names for great bundles of collected literature; and is a literature all by himself, and a series of impudent thieves who stole travellers’ tales and jotted them together in a personal narrative. For all that I believe in a figure of the blind Homer, and the impudent slave Æsop who played tricks on his master, and I firmly believe in a stalwart figure of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, “albeit,” he says, “I be not worthy, that was born in England, in the town of St. Albans, and passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ, 1322, in the day of St. Michael.”
There is one thing, a touch of character, put in, maybe, by the skilful editor of these travels, that makes us lean to the man as being a real person. It is his love of Gardens, and his pains to tell of them, and the stories of trees, and legends. And whether one who confessed to the fraud of putting these travels together—Jean de Bourgogne, by name—was a keen gardener or herbalist, or whether it was a literary habit of the fourteenth century (which, when I come to think of it, is so), somehow I feel that there is a garden-loving spirit in forming the book, and for that I love the man.
In his wanderings Sir John meets many things, and of these I beg leave to choose here and there one or two of his anecdotes when they touch an idea such as gardeners love. The first is of the True Cross, and the story of its origin. All of Sir John I have read in Mr. Pollard’s edition, than which nothing could be more satisfactory and clear expressed.