t is better to
have had pears and lost them than not to have had pears at all. You
come to know that the least (and rarest) part of the pleasure of raising
fruit is the vulgar eating it. You recall your delight in conversing
with the nurseryman, and looking at his illustrated catalogues, where
all the pears are drawn perfect in form, and of extra size, and at that
exact moment between ripeness and decay which it is so impossible to
hit in practice. Fruit cannot be raised on this earth to taste as you
imagine those pears would taste. For years you have this pleasure,
unalloyed by any disenchanting reality. How you watch the tender twigs
in spring, and the freshly forming bark, hovering about the healthy
growing tree with your pruning-knife many a sunny morning! That is
happiness. Then, if you know it, you are drinking the very wine of life;
and when the sweet juices of the earth mount the limbs, and flow down
the tender stem, ripening and reddening the pendent fruit, you feel that
you somehow stand at the source of things, and have no unimportant share
in the processes of Nature. Enter at this moment boy the destroyer,
whose office is that of preserver as well; for, though he removes the
fruit from your sight, it remains in your memory immortally ripe
and desirable. The gardener needs all these consolations of a high
philosophy.

EIGHTEENTH WEEK

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have
turned out so differently! If Ravaillac had not been imprisoned for
debt, he would not have stabbed Henry of Navarre. If William of Orange
had escaped assassination by Philip's emissaries; if France had followed
the French Calvin, and embraced Protestant Calvinism, as it came very
near doing towards the end of the sixteenth century; if the Continental
ammunition had not given out at Bunker's Hill; if Blucher had not "come
up" at Waterloo,--the lesson is, that things do not come up unless they
are planted. When you go behind the historical scenery, you find there
is a rope and pulley to effect every transformation which has astonished
you. It was the rascality of a minister and a contractor five years
before that lost the battle; and the cause of the defeat was worthless
ammunition. I should like to know how many wars have been caused by fits
of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love
of woman than by the hate of man. It is only because we are ill informed
that anything su