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Perhaps because I have not travelled enough I have never seen a garden of exotics that was a real garden in any good art sense; in any way, that is, lastingly pleasing to a noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be the garden of joy.
They may talk about beauty, but would you wear a flower that had been dipped in a grease-pot? No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy rose out of Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote more cant of this sort than any poet I know of.
It was the early part of September, and a delicious breeze passed by, bearing health and elasticity upon its wing, and breathing soft melody amid the trees and shrubs. Softly and calmly glided the smooth waters at the base of the garden. The green verandah running round the cottage was filled with beautiful exotics, which Ellen's hand had transported from the conservatory at Oakwood.
We also find many of the compositions of Germany so purely intellectual that they do not touch us until we have learned to like them. If we ever have a school of music, it will be in harmony with our rapidly developing characteristics. But it must grow up on our own soil; exotics never flourish long under strange skies.
Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word Sex was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note (as
Hazlet's repulsiveness was due to a very mistaken education, developing a very foolish idiosyncrasy, and especially to the pernicious system of encouraging sentiments and expressions which in a boy's mind could not be other than sickly exotics.
The noon-day sun broke hot and sultry through half-closed curtains of roseate silk, playing in broken beams upon rare and fragrant exotics, which cast the perfumes of southern summers over a chamber, moderate, indeed, as to its dimensions, but decorated with a splendour rather gaudy than graceful, and indicating much more a passion for luxury than a refinement of taste.
On every side rare exotics and choice plants exhaled a delicious perfume; tropic fruits grew from the carefully nurtured soil; orange, pomegranate, citron, &c. Gravelled walks led through rich shrubbery, darkened by overhanging foliage. Mossy paths, of charming intricacy, invited the wanderer to explore their mysterious windings.
Geijer was a romantic by nature, in politics as well as in literature, but he was above all an ardent Scandinavian, opposed to exotics, and passionately devoted to the great traditions of the past, a hero-worshiper, an enthusiast, and a Goth.
There were so many delightful little duties to be done; the chapel to be decorated with evergreens and exotics; the shrines of the saints to be decked; extra dainties to be made for the sick in the Infirmary; presents to be got up for the aged men and women of the "Home" attached to the convent; entertaining books to be selected and inscribed with the names of the boys and girls of their Orphan Asylum; doll-babies to be dressed and toys to be chosen for the infants of their Foundling; and, finally, a great Christmas-tree to be mounted and decorated for the delight of the whole community within their walls.
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