The Garden of Survival

They led me again through the maze of gorgeous and mysterious hopes, unremembered now so many years, that had marked my childhood. Few of these, if a

reams of that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly, till this moment, it had lain forgotten — a

my being. This dream which I had thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable va

nd set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to, where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scene rose up before me as of yesterday... the emotions themselves reconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy of her, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulse t

she sang — her favourite it was as well. I heard the twan

ittle chambe

en coming — goi

stand op

stepping, ente

come and g

ack their laught

the house

is shut, one

lcome the sweetness and the loveliness of her who sang. For I could not listen to the music, nor watch her fingers moving down the strings, her slender wrist and rounded arm, her foot upon the pedal as she held the

ticulate for me the beauty I could not utter, that broug

happiness, flew away into the darkness. And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur o

a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me within that chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that was now a veil, and now a m

n, there is peace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hid with beauty very far away, and yet so near t

whispering through the silence those marvellous words

l — and

h thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards among the branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of the early roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow of lighted lamp

ed the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world, when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, and companioning h

nd plants and shrubs — glowed all about me in the darkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strong stems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon every side, brimming with beauty and stillness

which is dead and that which is alive. Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, that frontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power of

nd I passed it. Beauty came through

alking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that I w

f all things. The Beauty that in you was truth, in Mari