make are a disordered abundance like that of weedy places and they are as cruel as wild creatures are cruel and they have unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical shape in that isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has her pleasure-house and her prison, and in that ‘isle of the old and the young,’ where until her enchantment is broken second childhood watches over children who never grow old and who seem to the bystander who knows their story ‘like images’ or like ‘the rabbits on the grass.’ It is as though Nature spoke through him at all times in the mood that is upon her when she is opening the apple-blossom or reddening the apple or thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that the men and women of his verse and of his stories are all the ministers of her mood.
When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and its long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and I am not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first dozen verses of Golden Wings that begin —
‘Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.
Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.
On the bricks the green moss grew,
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