My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.
Interpretation
The quote expresses how nature can evoke deep feelings and provide a refuge from life's concerns.
In this quote, Alexander Smith compares his experience in his garden to the soothing effects of music. The garden, filled with silence and fragrance, creates an emotional sanctuary where the stresses of life are kept at bay, allowing for peaceful reflection and appreciation of beauty.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the therapeutic benefits of nature.
Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.
Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.
Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.
I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.
The voice of the natural world would be, "Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering."
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