In each
century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been
discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than
in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still
more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to
believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope
it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all
the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new
things people began to find out in the last century was that
thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as
good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad
thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a
scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after
it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.
So long as Mistress Mary's
mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour
opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or
interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and
wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to her, though
she was not at all aware of it. They began to push her about for her
own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and
moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old
gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and
with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy
and his "creatures," there was no room left for the disagreeable
thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow
and tired.
So long as Colin
shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness
and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hourly on
humps and early death, he was a hysterical half-crazy little
hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also
did not know that he could get well and could stand upon his feet if he
tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old
hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily
through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood. His
scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was
nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things can happen
to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into
his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by
putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot
be in one place.
|
 "Where, you tend a rose, my lad, |
|
| A thistle cannot grow." |
|
While
the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive
with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful
places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains of
Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled
with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had
never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. He
had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on
mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him
and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A
terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had
let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to
allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and
deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so
brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people
because it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom. Most
strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man with some hidden
crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked
shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was, "Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England."
He
had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his
study and told her she might have her "bit of earth." He had been in
the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere
more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He
had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and
had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them
with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.
But
the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he
realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had
happened. He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had
been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted, any man's
soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his.
But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a
carpet of moss by a stream. It was a clear little stream which ran
quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp
greenness. Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as
it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and dip their heads
to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away. It seemed like
a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper.
The valley was very, very still.
As he
sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven
gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the
valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not.
He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things
growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots
growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he
found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things
years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what
wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know
that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind—filling and
filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a
sweet clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen
and risen until at last it swept the dark water away. But of course he
did not think of this himself. He only knew that the valley seemed to
grow quieter and quieter as he sat and stared at the bright delicate
blueness. He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening
to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up
slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath
and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and
released in him, very quietly.
"What is it?" he said, almost in a whisper, and he passed his hand over his forehead. "I almost feel as if—I were alive!"
I
do not know enough about the wonderfulness of undiscovered things to be
able to explain how this had happened to him. Neither does any one else
yet. He did not understand at all himself—but he remembered this
strange hour months afterward when he was at Misselthwaite again and he
found out quite by accident that on this very day Colin had cried out
as he went into the secret garden:
"I am going to live forever and ever and ever!"
The
singular calmness remained with him the rest of the evening and he
slept a new reposeful sleep; but it was not with him very long. He did
not know that it could be kept. By the next night he had opened the
doors wide to his dark thoughts and they had come trooping and rushing
back. He left the valley and went on his wandering way again. But,
strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes—sometimes
half-hours—when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to
lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one.
Slowly—slowly—for no reason that he knew of—he was "coming alive" with
the garden....
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Chapter 27
