50 PRÆTERITA-I

early years, to fill gaps, after getting on a little first; but will yet venture here the tediousness of explaining that my saying “in Herne Hill garden all fruit was forbidden,”¹ only meant, of course, forbidden unless under defined restriction; which made the various gatherings of each kind in its season a sort of harvest festival; and which had this further good in its apparent severity, that, although in the at last indulgent areas, the peach which my mother gathered for me when she was sure it was ripe, and the cherry pie for which I had chosen the cherries red all round, were, I suppose, of more ethereal flavour to me than they could have been to children allowed to pluck and eat at their will; still the unalloyed and long continuing pleasure given me by our fruit-tree avenue was in its blossom, not in its bearing. For the general epicurean enjoyment of existence, potatoes well browned, green pease well boiled,-broad beans of the true bitter,-and the pots of damson and currant for whose annual filling we were dependent more on the greengrocer than the garden, were a hundredfold more important to me than the dozen or two of nectarines of which perhaps I might get the halves of three,-(the other sides mouldy)-or the bushel or two of pears which went directly to the store-shelf. So that, very early indeed in my thoughts of trees, I had got at the principle given fifty years afterwards in Proserpina, that the seeds and fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the flowers for the fruit.² The first joy of the year being in its snowdrops, the second, and cardinal one, was in the almond blossom,-every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf; and for many and many a year to come,-until indeed, the whole of life became autumn to me,-my chief prayer for the kindness of heaven, in its flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not touch the almond blossom.

¹ [See above, § 39 (p. 36).]

² [See Proserpina, i. ch. iv. § 2 (Vol. XXV. p. 249); and, earlier, Queen of the Air, § 60 (Vol. XIX. pp. 357-8).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]