May

May 7th.--I love my garden. I am writing in it now in
the late afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes
and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new
green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower.
Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long
conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales.
The gentleman owl says [[musical notes occur here in the printed
text]], and she answers from her tree a little way off,
[[musical notes]], beautifully assenting to and completing her
lord's remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically
that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall
not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived
in the house, much less in the garden, for twenty-five years,
and it is such a pretty old place that the people who might have
lived here and did not, deliberately preferring the horrors
of a flat in a town, must have belonged to that vast number of eyeless
and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed.
Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty; but the greater
part of my spring happiness is due to the scent of the wet earth
and young leaves.

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood,
for indoors there are servants and furniture) but in quite
different ways, and my spring happiness bears no resemblance
to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more intense,
and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out
in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children.
But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches
sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white
blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding.
I never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place.
Even across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east,
and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one,
a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows,
and beyond are great stretches of sandy heath and pine forests,
and where the forests leave off the bare heath begins again;
but the forests are beautiful in their lofty, pink-stemmed vastness,
far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green, and underfoot a bright
green wortleberry carpet, and everywhere the breathless silence;
and the bare heaths are beautiful too, for one can see across them
into eternity almost, and to go out on to them with one's face