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The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going...
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Every morning and evening and as often in the daytime as I can remember I am going to say, ‘Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! I am going to be as strong as Dickon, as strong as Dickon!’
“If you keep doing it every day as regularly as soldiers go through drill we shall see what will happen and find out if the experiment succeeds. You learn things by saying them over and over and thinking about them until they stay in your mind forever and I think it will be the same with Magic. If you keep calling it to come to you and help you it will get to be part of you and it will stay and do things.”
Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million — worlds like us. Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it — an’ call it what tha’ likes.
“Thy own mother’s in this ’ere very garden, I do believe. She couldna’ keep out of it.
ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts — just mere thoughts — are as powerful as electric batteries — as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.
When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood.
Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.
“Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.”
the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive with it,
he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones.
A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through.
it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom.
As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the valley itself.
He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind — filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside.
Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly.
By the next night he had opened the doors wide to his dark thoughts and they had come trooping and rushing back.
But, strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes — sometimes half-hours — when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one.
his soul was slowly growing stronger, too.
Of course this was the wrong Magic — to begin by saying “too late.”
“Take me into the garden, my boy,” he said at last. “And tell me all about it.” And so they led him in.
The listener laughed until tears came into his eyes and sometimes tears came into his eyes when he was not laughing.
Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire — Master Colin!
