I have been planting a perennial border in the garden and consulting, with serious damage to the temper, a number of the garden-books now in fashion. When a man drives at practice--when he desires to know precisely at what season, in what soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon lilies, to decide between _Ayrshire Ruga_ and _Fellenberg_ for the pillar that requires a red rose, to fix the right proportion of sand and leaf-mould to suit his carnations--when 'his only plot' is to plant the bergamot--he resents being fobbed off with prattle:-- "My squills make a brave show this morning, and the little petticoated Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower rock-garden (surely Narcissus ought to have been a girl!) begins to 'take the winds of March with beauty.' I am expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will benefit the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower before Billy comes home from school," etc. But the other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellwanger, I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, a great American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the still air and sunshine and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a dank, sodden season, bleak or shivering. 'The sugar and scarlet maple, the dogwood and sumac, are wanting to impart their warmth of colour; and St. Martin's summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence' comparable with that of the Indian summer over there. The Virginia creeper which reddens our Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an importation of no very long standing--old enough to be accepted as a feature of the place, not yet old enough to be inseparably connected with it in song. Yet-- "Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most universally admired. This might almost answer to our own fall of the leaf, and is far less sombre than many apostrophes to the season that occur throughout English verse." From this Mr. Ellwanger proceeds to compare Keats's with the wonderful 'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the magnificent opening:-- "I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . . ."