Alfred George Gardiner

Alfred George Gardiner

Alfred George Gardiner (2 June 1865 – 3 March 1946) was an English journalist and essayist. He wrote his essays under the pseudonym Alpha of the Plough.

Quotes

• At the word I turned hastily to another column and found the news that had stirred him. And even in the midst of world-shaking events it stirred me too. For a brief moment I forgot the war and was back in that cheerful world where we used to be happy, where we greeted the rising sun with light hearts and saw its setting without fear. In that cheerful world I can hardly recall a time when a big man with a black beard was not my King ... I owe more undiluted happiness to him than to any man that ever lived. For he was the genial tyrant in a world that was all sunshine.
  • On being told in 1915 that W. G. Grace had died. From Pebbles on the Shore (1916)

• For Nature is a cunning nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity we are soothed to sleep.
  • From "The Vanity of Old Age", Windfalls (1920)

• It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the tangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that ancient fable. Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of soul that is found in gardens.
  • From "A Vanished Garden", Leaves in the Wind (1920)

• It is not that we cannot think. It is that we are afraid to think. It is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it. Even some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed in thinking independently. We only succeed in getting into other flocks.
  • From "Thinking for One's Self", Leaves in the Wind (1920)