three o'clock
`` He was a good man , for he loved his garden '' -- that is the epitaph I would have put on his monument , because it gives one a far clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of sonorous Latinities . How could he be anything _ but _ good since he loved a garden -- that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us , and leaves us , each time we have been in it , clearer , and purer , and more harmless ? June 16th . -- Yesterday morning I got up at three o'clock and stole through the echoing passages and strange dark rooms , undid with trembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah , and passed out into a wonderful , unknown world . I stood for a few minutes motionless on the steps , almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep , and there is nothing but the beauty left . It was quite light , yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless grey-blue sky ; the flowers were all awake , saturating the air with scent ; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me , in loud raptures at the coming of the sun . There in front of me was the sun - dial , there were the rose bushes , there was the bunch of pansies I had dropped the night before still lying on the path , but how strange and unfamiliar it all looked , and how holy -- as though God must be walking there in the cool of the day .