gh the deeps of God.

XXX

Flowers--The Garden

The air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in
mind of _the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass!_--he had
often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a
thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air
about him to-day--clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity
and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He
sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the
eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think
that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground
went to the acre! All the outer edge of it was encircled by
trees--elms, planes, and limes; the borders, full of flowering shrubs,
were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval
bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping
in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space
and extent, achieved Hugh could not guess how. To-day all the edges of
the borders were full of flowers; and as he wandered among them he was
more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the
mystery of flowers! The extraordinary variety of leaf and colour, the
whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an
invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink
blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of
paper; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the
base; but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and
horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless
freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil! These
gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading,
in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sudden
thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky
roots, the flowers of incredible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all
splashed and dappled with the richest colours; and then the mixture of
blended fragrance; the hot, honied smell of the candytuft, with
aromatic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again
was the escholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the
delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, which almost
made one shudder. There was some mind behi