that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Here
are Ruskin, Lubbock, White's _Selborne_, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert
Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do
not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, _Wuthering Heights_, Lamb's _Essays_,
Johnson's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal
Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I
loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French
children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German
children's books, on which I was brought up, with their charming
woodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and good
housemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of the
atmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgments
and rewards in which they lived, and how the _Finger Gottes_ was
impressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most of
the dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and book
about gardens that has been published of late years.

These gardening books are an unfailing delight, especially in winter,
when to sit by my blazing peat fire with the snow driving past the
windows and read the luscious descriptions of roses and all the other
summer glories is one of my greatest pleasures. And then how well I get
to know and love those gardens whose gradual development has been
described by their owners, and how happily I wander in fancy down the
paths of certain specially charming ones in Lancashire, Berkshire,
Surrey, and Kent, and admire the beautiful arrangement of bed and
border, and the charming bits in unexpected corners, and all the
evidences of untiring love! Any book I see advertised that treats of
gardens I immediately buy, and thus possess quite a collection of
fascinating and instructive garden literature. A few are feeble, and get