The old house at Moseley ... was surrounded by a large extent of garden ground and ample lawns. The gardens were on different levels--the upper was the flower garden. No gardener with his dozens of bedding plants molested that fragrant solitude, but there, unhindered, the narcissus multiplied into sheets of bloom, the little yellow rose embodied the summer sunshine, the white roses climbed into the old apple trees, or looked out from the depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet-briar was there, though we saw it not. Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden, surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond which rose banks of trees. [The "blue door" in this garden wall is introduced in the _Countess Eve_, and another part of the garden in _Sir Percival_.] On these old walls nectarines, peaches, and apricots ripened in the August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden stretched a winding lawn, made in the shape of a letter S, and surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a complete seclusion. In the broad light of noon, when the lilacs and laburnums and guelder-roses were full of bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly burnished, reflected the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious solitude, where we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts' content. But as night fell, when "the laurels' pattering talk was over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, and in its stillness and loneliness. _Qualis ab incepto!_ Are we not in fancy carried straightway to that scene where the boy Inglesant goes back to his first schoolmaster, whom he finds sitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvellous things concerning the search for the Divine Light? or to that other scene, where he talks with Dr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, and hears that rare Platonist discourse on the glories of the visible world, saying: "I am in fact '_Incola coeli in terrâ_,' an inhabitant of paradise and heaven upon earth; and I may soberly confess that sometimes, walking abroad after my studies, I have been almost mad with pleasure,--the effect of nature upon my soul having been inexpressibly ravishing, and beyond what I can convey to you." Indeed, not only _John Inglesant_, but all of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better described than as a writing out at large of the wistful memory of that time when men heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day--and were still not afraid. But we must not pass on without observing the more individual traits of the boy noted down in the record: