Then, as I lay idly back, looking into the blue mist and enjoying the far green of the poplars, my mind turned to all the lovely gardens that I had read about. I thought of "that railit garden," that James I. of Scotland--poet, musician, and artist--loved; and where he fell in love with the Lady Jane, the fair daughter of the Earl of Somerset. There, he tells us, he passed his deadly life--"full of peyne and penance." From a grim tower he first saw his lady-love. He tells us in the "King's Quhair," how he saw her walking in a fair garden, and how, in seeing her, "it sent the blude of all my body to my hert;" and how, for ever afterwards, "his heart became her thrall," although "there was no token of menace in her face." There, amidst "a garden fair," by towered walls, knit round with hawthorn hedges, where thick boughs beshaded long alleys, and where the sweet green juniper gave out its aromatic fragrance, he, poor poet-king, sang of love, listening all the while to the "little sweet nightingale that sat on small green twists, and that sang 'now soft, now lowd,' till all the garden and the walls rung 'right of the song.'" Then I thought of that still garden at St. Mary's chapel, at Westminster, where the great father of English poetry wrote his treatise on the "Astrolabe" for his little son Lewis. I imagined him with his wise and tender face, and far-off, deep-set grey eyes looking out on the world kindly, serious, gentle. I liked to remember the great man's peaceful deathbed, and thought of his last sweet verses-- "Flie fro the prese, and dwell with sothfastnesse; Suffise unto thy Goode, though it be small, For horde hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse." It is an old, old story, and yet always a new one; but in Chaucer's time, failure met with a sharp ending. I thought also of that fair garden near the Temple, which our greatest poet has touched with the divine intuition of genius, and made bloom with roses that no frost can kill, or smoke can soil. Where Plantagenet plucked the white rose of York, and Somerset the red one of Lancaster. Then I thought of unfortunate Richard's queen in the garden at Langley, and of the old faithful, rugged gardener and of his bitter cry of pity. "Here did she drop a tear. Here in this place I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace." [Illustration: _Photo by Frith._ CHAPTER HOUSE AT WENLOCK.] [Sidenote: BACON'S GARDEN] Then I thought of Lord Bacon's beautiful garden of "prince-like" proportions. According to him, the ideal garden did not measure less than thirty acres, and was to be divided into three parts--a garden proper, a greene, a heath, or desert.