The Complete Writings, vol 1 | Page 4

of one of the oldest daily news- papers in New England,
and obliged to fill its columns day after day (as the village mill is
obliged to render every day so many sacks of flour or of meal to its
hungry customers), it naturally occurred to him, "Why not write
something which I myself, as well as my readers, shall enjoy? The
market gives them facts enough; politics, lies enough; art, affectations
enough; criminal news, horrors enough; fashion, more than enough of
vanity upon vanity, and vexation of purse. Why should they not have
some of those wandering and joyous fancies which solace my hours?"
The suggestion ripened into execution. Men and women read, and
wanted more. These garden letters began to blossom every week; and
many hands were glad to gather pleasure from them. A sign it was of
wisdom. In our feverish days it is a sign of health or of convalescence
that men love gentle pleasure, and enjoyments that do not rush or roar,
but distill as the dew.

The love of rural life, the habit of finding enjoyment in familiar things,
that susceptibility to Nature which keeps the nerve gently thrilled in her
homliest nooks and by her commonest sounds, is worth a thousand
fortunes of money, or its equivalents.
Every book which interprets the secret lore of fields and gardens, every
essay that brings men nearer to the understanding of the mysteries
which every tree whispers, every brook murmurs, every weed, even,
hints, is a contribution to the wealth and the happiness of our kind. And
if the lines of the writer shall be traced in quaint characters, and be
filled with a grave humor, or break out at times into merriment, all this
will be no presumption against their wisdom or his goodness. Is the oak
less strong and tough because the mosses and weather-stains stick in all
manner of grotesque sketches along its bark? Now, truly, one may not
learn from this little book either divinity or horticulture; but if he gets a
pure happiness, and a tendency to repeat the happiness from the simple
stores of Nature, he will gain from our friend's garden what Adam lost
in his, and what neither philosophy nor divinity has always been able to
restore.
Wherefore, thanking you for listening to a former letter, which begged
you to consider whether these curious and ingenious papers, that go
winding about like a half-trodden path between the garden and the field,
might not be given in book-form to your million readers, I remain,
yours to command in everything but the writing of an Introduction,
HENRY WARD BEECHER.

BY WAY OF DEDICATION
MY DEAR POLLY,--When a few of these papers had appeared in
"The Courant," I was encouraged to continue them by hearing that they
had at least one reader who read them with the serious mind from
which alone profit is to be expected. It was a maiden lady, who, I am
sure, was no more to blame for her singleness than for her age; and she
looked to these honest sketches of experience for that aid which the

professional agricultural papers could not give in the management of
the little bit of garden which she called her own. She may have been
my only disciple; and I confess that the thought of her yielding a simple
faith to what a gainsaying world may have regarded with levity has
contributed much to give an increased practical turn to my reports of
what I know about gardening. The thought that I had misled a lady,
whose age is not her only singularity, who looked to me for advice
which should be not at all the fanciful product of the Garden of Gull,
would give me great pain. I trust that her autumn is a peaceful one, and
undisturbed by either the humorous or the satirical side of Nature.
You know that this attempt to tell the truth about one of the most
fascinating occupations in the world has not been without its dangers. I
have received anonymous letters. Some of them were murderously
spelled; others were missives in such elegant phrase and dress, that
danger was only to be apprehended in them by one skilled in the
mysteries of medieval poisoning, when death flew on the wings of a
perfume. One lady, whose entreaty that I should pause had something
of command in it, wrote that my strictures on "pusley " had so inflamed
her husband's zeal, that, in her absence in the country, he had rooted up
all her beds of portulaca (a sort of cousin of the fat weed), and utterly
cast it out. It is, however, to be expected, that retributive justice would
visit the innocent as well as the guilty of an offending family. This is