Garden Hermits

he created an atmosphere of contemplative melancholy. If the owners of landscape gardens had built snug hermitages and encouraged contemplative souls to live in them, they could have created the sort of mood that Milton wrote about. A figure in a monastic robes walking silently in a grove of trees would have been perfect, but by decorating hermitages with bones and insisting that monks not cut their nails, hair or beards, they were creating an atmosphere more sinister than meditative.

Milton wrote Il Penseroso and L'Allegro as a young man before his puritan tendencies became dominant. When read together, these poems express not just the complex emotions of a young Englishman, but the complexity of the human soul. They remind me of Hermann Hesse's novel Narziss und Goldmund. Any work of art which can evoke or express such a full range of emotions is bound to be interesting. I am not suggesting that we pay hermits to live in our gardens, but maybe we should have a place for melancholy pleasures in them.

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