The Solitary Summer | Page 8

So I read and laugh over
my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushions
and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains
shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by
both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who asserts that in the
country the only things that make one happy are meals. "I was happy,"
he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin in the Island of
Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain,--"I was happy
when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who live in the
country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity of mind, as
well as from the desire of eating." And such is the perverseness of
human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even more than
Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily.
In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am
sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many
lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as
persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual
feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could so
beautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amount
before they can painfully stammer out a sentence that will describe it;
and when they have got it out, how it seems to have just missed the
core of the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it is
of what was perhaps a mighty feeling! I read Goethe on a special seat,
never departed from when he accompanies me, a seat on the south side
of an ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimes
prevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a great
beech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches
I can see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming out
beyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, its
first spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almost
golden backed by a solemn cluster of firs. Here I read Goethe--
everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here
I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I
wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the
complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in
wonder and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and

down in the shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the
glade in the opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave
the book on the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my
flower beds, from which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just
conception of what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is
not.
In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt
Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful
spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,
silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings
of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such rapture of
jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and trees, and clouds,
and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all that breathes and is
sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and mend and comfort
that which never can be helped and mended and comforted; such eager
looking to death, delicate death, as the one complete and final
consolation--before this revelation of yearning, universal pity,
every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.
When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my
drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath
the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take
Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,
and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship, bearing
Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights. How can I
tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is
brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the
elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by
simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have
done with them once and for all.
What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something,
and I know of no objects