These still-room books are as much part of a vanished past as the old herb-gardens, those quiet enclosures full of sunlight and delicious scents, of bees and fairies, which we foolish moderns have allowed to fall into disuse. The herb garden was always the special domain of the housewife, and one likes to think of the many generations of fair women who made these gardens their own, tending them with their own hands, rejoicing in their beauty and peace and interpreting in humble, human fashion something of the wonder and mystery of Nature in the loveliness of a garden enclosed. For surely this was the charm of these silent secluded places, so far removed from turmoil that from them it was possible to look at the world with clear eyes and a mind undisturbed by clamour. And what of the fairies in those gardens? We live in such a hurrying, material age that even in our gardens we seem to have forgotten the fairies, who surely have the first claim on them. Does not every child know that fairies love thyme and foxgloves and the lavish warm scent of the old cabbage rose? Surely the fairies thronged to those old herb-gardens as to a familiar haunt. Can you not see them dancing in the twilight?
The dark elves of Saxon days have well-nigh vanished with the bogs and marshes and the death-like vapours which gave them birth. With the passing of centuries the lesser elves have become tiny of stature and friendly to man, warming themselves by our firesides and disporting themselves in our gardens. Perhaps now they even look to us for protection, lest in this age of materialism they be driven altogether from the face of the earth. As early as the twelfth century we find mention of creatures akin to the brownies, whom we all love; for the serious Gervase of Tilbury tells us of these goblins, less than half an inch high, having faces wrinkled with age, and dressed in patched garments. These little creatures, he assures us, come and work at night in the houses of mankind; but they had not lost their impish ways and elvish tricks, “for at times when Englishmen ride abroad in the darkness of night, an unseen Portunos [Brownie?] will join company with the wayfarer; and after riding awhile by his side will at length seize his reins and lead his horse into the slough wherein he will stick and wallow while the Portunos departs with mocking laughter, thus making sport of man’s simplicity.” Perhaps they still make sport of our simplicity, but we shall be the losers if they vanish altogether from the earth. If in impish mood they lead the wayfarer into sloughs, do not the sheen-bright elves lighten some of the darkest paths of pain which human beings are forced to tread? Are not these Ariel-like creatures links between the flowers of earth which they haunt and the stars of heaven whence they seem to derive their radiance? The fairies have almost deserted us, but perhaps they will one day come back to our gardens and teach us that there is something true, though beyond what we can know, in the old astrological lore of the close secret communion between stars and flowers. Do not flowers seem to reflect in microscopic form those glorious flowers which deck the firmament of heaven? In many flowers there is something so star-like that almost unconsciously our minds connect them with the luminaries in the great expanse above us, and from this it seems but a short step to the belief that there is between them a secret communion which is past our understanding.
“This is the enchantment, this the exaltation,
The all-compensating wonder,
Giving to common things wild kindred
With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove;
Linking such heights and such humilities,
Hand in hand in ordinal dances,
That I do think my tread,
Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass
Flickers the unwithering stars.”[134]
Mystics of all ages and of all civilisations have felt this secret bond between what are surely the most beautiful of God’s creations—flowers and stars; and its fascination is in no small part due to the exquisite frailty and short-lived beauty of the flowers of earth and the stupendous majesty of the flowers in the heavens, those myriad worlds in whose existence a thousand years is but as a passing dream.
(Inscription at the end of “The vertuose boke Of Dystyllacyon of the waters of all maner of Herbes.” 1527.)
FOOTNOTES:
[124] John Archer (one of the Physicians in Ordinary to Charles II.) also asserts in his Compendious Herbal (1673) that “the Sun doth not draw away the Vertues of Herbs, but adds to them.” Archer gives full astrological directions for the gathering of herbs:—
“I have mentioned in the ensuing Treatise of Herbs the Planet that Rules every Herb for this end, that you may the better understand their Nature and may gather them when they are in their full strength, which is when the Planet is especially strong, and then in his own Hour gather your Herb; therefore that you may know what hour belongs to every Planet take notice that Astrologers do assign the seven days of the week to the seven planets, as to the Sun or ⊙ Sunday; to the Moon or ☽ Monday; to Mars or ♂ Tuesday; to Mercury or ☿ Wednesday; to Jupiter or ♃ Thursday; to Venus or ♀ Friday; to Saturn or ♄ Saturday. And know that every Planet governs the first Hour after Sun Rise upon his day and the next Planet to him takes the next Hour successively in this order, ♄, ♃, ♂, ⊙, ♀, ☿, ☽, ♄, ♃. So be it any day every Seventh Hour comes to each Planet successively, as if the day be Thursday then the first hour after Sun Rising is Jupiter’s, the next ♂, the next ⊙, next ♀. So on till it come to ♃ again. And if you gather Herbs in their Planetary Hour you may expect to do Wonders, otherwise not; to Astrologers I need say nothing; to others this is as much as can easily be learnt.”—The Compendious Herbal, by John Archer, One of his Majesties Physicians in Ordinary.
[125] In this connection he quotes Dr. Pinck, Warden of New College, Oxford, who, when he was “almost fourscore yeares old, would rise very betimes in the morning and going into his Garden he would take a Mattock or Spade, digging there an hour or two, which he found very advantageous to his health.”