Page:Forbes Watson - Flowers and Gardens.djvu/16

Preface ''art-teachers; but where I have consciously borrowed from him, I have said so. 'These papers are left in charge of a friend for publication.'' FORBES WATSON.

''The pen fell from the hand of my friend when he had written the foregoing lines. Within two days he was taken "home" to his "Father's house." This short interval was filled with intense suffering, save only during a brief sleep, when the flowers of which he had been writing, and which loving hands brought to blossom near his bed, haunted with their beauty and perfume the unsleeping sense of the imagination, and lured him through enchanted fields, where in his dream he saw vision after vision of an unutterable glory of floral splendour. The ecstasy of his delight in that dream abode with him, and lifted a bright light over the few hours of agony that intervened ere he slept again in the peace of Death. He believed a foretaste had been given him of "that which remaineth for them that love God"—that He whose dying lips were touched with gall had given him a sweeter anodyne in his brief agony.'' vi