And if human affections be, as the poets declare, immortal, we have the reason why an old garden, in the only sense in which it ever is old, by the almanack, has that whisper and waving of secrecy, that air of watchful intentness, that far-reaching, mythological, unearthly look, that effect of being a kind of twilighted space common to the two worlds of past and present. Who will not agree with me in this? It matters not when you go there—at dawn, at noonday, no less than when the sky is murky and night-winds are sighing—and although you shall be the only visible human being present, it is not alone that you feel. A thrill comes over you, a mysterious sense warns you that this is none other than the sanctuary of "the dead," as we call them; the place where, amid the hush of passionless existence, the wide leisure of uncounted time, the shades of once familiar presences keep their "tongueless vigil." They fly not at the "dully sound" of human footsteps; they ask no sympathy for regret which dare not tell the secret of its sorrow; but, with the gentle gait of old-world courtesy, they move aside, and when you depart resume occupation of ground which, for the sake of despairing wishes and memories of an uneffaced past, they may not quit. After life's fitful fever these waifs of a vanished world sleep not well; here are some consumed with covetousness, who are learning not to resent the word "mine" applied by the living owner of hall and garden, field and store; some that prey on withered bliss—the "bitter sweet of days that were"—this, the miser whose buried treasure lies undiscovered here, and who has nothing in God's bank in the other world; this, the author of the evil book; and this loveless, unlovely pair, the ruined and ruiner, yoked for aye; a motley band, forsooth, with "Satan's sergeants" keeping guard!
It is ever the indirect that is most eloquent. Someone says: Hence these tokens of a dead past open out vistas for one's imagination and drop hints of romance that would make thrilling reading in many volumes, but which shall never reach Mudie's.
Even Nature is not proof against the spell of an old garden. The very trees have an "ancient melody of an inward agony":
"The place is silent and aware
It has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes,
But that is its own affair"—
even Nature forgets to be her cold, impassive self, and puts on a sympathetic-waiting look in a spot so intricately strewn and meshed over with the fibres of human experience. Long and close intimacy with mankind under various aspects—witness of things that happened to squires, dames, priests, courtiers, servitors, page, or country-maid, in the roundabout of that "curious, restless, clamorous being which we call life"—has somehow tinged the place with a sensibility (one had almost said a wizardry) not properly its own. And this superadded quality reaches to the several parts of the garden and is not confined to the scene as a whole. Each inanimate item of the place, each spot, seems invested with a gift of attraction—to have a hidden tongue that could syllable forgotten names—to possess a power of fixing your attention, of fastening itself upon your mind, as though it had become, in a sense, humanised, and claimed kindred with you as related to that secret group with whose fortunes it was allied, with whose passions it had held correspondence, and were letting you know it could speak an if it would of
"All the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."