Читать книгу In the Garden of Delight онлайн

4 страница из 30

There are really two of the-most-beautiful-place-in-the-world. One of them is the real outdoors; and the other is outdoors in the Land of Make-Believe. The advantage of the real outdoors is that its loveliness is ready-made. One invents nothing; one merely opens eyes and ears and soul to drink in beauty and joy, and learns, almost without knowing it, the most curious and interesting things. The advantage of Make-Believe is that when things are as they shouldn’t be, one can instantly step over into that blessed country and make them be exactly what they should. No one ever sees you do it, either, or guesses that you can make a world in a twinkling, out of dreams. It has all the charm and mystery of a fairy ring, or fern seed, or Aladdin’s lamp. One’s body can perch on a horsehair piano stool, twisting one’s two little meat legs about its one fat leg of rosewood, and great-aunts may be sure you are practising scales most faithfully; and all the time you are really running races in the wind with charming, dirty children who tear their dresses all day long, and never had their hair in curl-papers in their lives.