“May fifteen”—it is my diary for last year—“apple blossoms showing pink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels this morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves.”
Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit for a pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, the asparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now, indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; the hotbed glasses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflower plants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower. The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned and filled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Cod water-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, has begun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe this year it will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if not optimistic.
The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises follow rapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the Japanese irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annuals into their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to the various asters and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color scheme had been carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregarded now, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purple asters against salvia, with white dahlias behind—a strip of daring fall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which delighted me—and which my wife said was horrible.
So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaseless work and ceaseless wonder. But there is a moment in its passage, as yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it is the subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes in April for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, always evening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset still lingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon the veranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the song of the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of a far-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors with the return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other sounds comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out of the air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frog chorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes. But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down into the dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earth and growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distant meadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warm and fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then is very intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with the awakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner in cities are but as the shadow of a dream.
The Bubble, Reputation
A great dramatist is authority for the statement that—
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair to blame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that has lived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may be doubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been. His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair, N. J., or West Newton, Mass., and his public acts were not always calculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But to blame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood around the walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who are familiar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alike in this—when we hear the words Louis XIV we do not think of a great monarch with a powdered wig and a powdered mistress, of magnificent fountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliant court and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a gilt chair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match. If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly—well, differ with you.