Its beauty’s secret nearer.
Love’s language may be talked with these!
To work out choicest sentences,
No blossoms can be neater—
And, such being used in Eastern bowers,
Young maids may wonder if the flowers
Or meanings be the sweeter.
IX
A FEAST OF WILD STRAWBERRIES
There’s many a child has crowned her head with Buttercups—no bad substitute for gold—mirrored her face in a pool, and dreamed she was a Queen. There’s many a boy has lain for hours in the Wild Thyme on a cliff top and sent dream-fleets to Spain. The touch of imagination is all that is required to make the world seem real, and not until that wand is used is the world real. Only those moments when we hear the stars, peer in through Heaven’s gates, or rub shoulders with a poet’s vision, are real and substantial; the rest is only dreamland, vague, unsatisfactory. Huddled rows of dingy houses, smoke, grime, roar of traffic, scramble for the pence that make the difference, these things are not abiding thoughts—“Here there is no abiding city”—but those great moments when we grow as the flowers grow, sing as the birds sing, and feel at ease with the furthest stars, those are the moments we live in and remember. Our great garden may hold our thoughts if we wish. When we own England with our eyes, when all the fields and woods, the mountain streams, the pools and rills, rivers and ponds, are ours; when we are on our own ground with Ling and Broom, Heather, Heath and Furze for our carpet; when Harebells ring our matin’s bell and Speedwell close the day for us; when the Water-lily is our cup, broad leaves of Dock our platter, and King-cups our array—how vast!—of gold plate, then are we kings indeed.