He was the last of the great romantic mopes. He walked in a cloud, perhaps in hopes of soaking up sky and becoming more blue, but bowed to green as a needier hue: He was a connoisseur of gardens, an editor of colors who changed nothing of his authors’ works, content to love. I see him now, gaping at the new shoots, the unlit bulbs, the fragile impatiens, as if he were the garden fence itself, keeping out the impatient predator deer and rodent. If he had anything to bequeath from this life, it was innocence, though by now his heirs are gone, too.