CHAPTER II.

"Who loves a garden still keeps his Eden."

Its territories stand, so to speak, betwixt heavenand earth, so that it shares the cross-lights of each. It parades the joys of earth, yet no less hints the joys of heaven. It tells of man's happy tillage of his plot of ground, yet blazes abroad the infinite abundance of God's wide husbandry of the world. It bespeaks the glory of earth's array, yet publishes its passingness.[6]

Again. The punctual waking of the flowers to new life upon the ruin of the old is unfavourable to the fashionable theory of extinction, for it shows death as the prelude of life. Nevertheless, be it admitted, the garden-allegory points not all one way; it is, so to speak, a paradox that mocks while it comforts. For a garden is ever perplexing us with the "riddle of the painful earth," ever challenging our faith with its counter-proof, ever thrusting before our eyes the abortive effort, the inequality of lot (two roses on a single stem, the one full-blown, a floral paragon, the other dwarfed and withered), the permitted spite of destiny which favours the fittest and drives the weak to the wall—ever preaching, with damnable iteration, the folly of resisting the ills that warp life and blight fair promise.

And yet while this is so, the annual spectacle of spring's fresh repair—the awakening from winter'strance—the new life that grows in the womb of the tomb—is happy augury to the soul that passes away, immature and but half-expressed, of lusty days and consummate powers in the everlasting garden of God. It is this very garden's message, "the best is yet to be," that smothers the self-pitying whine in poor David Gray's Elegy[7]and braces his spirit with the tonic of a wholesome pride. To the human flower that is born to blush unseen, or born, perchance, not to bloom at all, but only to feel the quickening thrill of April-passion—the first sweet consciousness of life—the electric touch in the soul like the faint beatings in the calyx of the rose—and then to die, to die "not knowing what it was to live"—to such seemingly cancelled souls the garden's message is "trust, acquiesce, be passive in the Master's hand: the game of life is lost, but not for aye—

... "There is life with GodIn other Kingdom of a sweeter air:In Eden every flower is blown."

To come back to lower ground, a garden represents what one may call the first simplicity ofexternal Nature's ways and means, and the first simplicity of man's handling of them, carried to distinction. On one side we have Nature's "unpremeditated art" surpassed upon its own lines—Nature's tardy efforts and common elementary traits pushed to a masterpiece. On the other side is the callow craft of Adam's "'prentice han'," turned into scrupulous nice-fingered Art, with forcing-pits, glass-houses, patent manures, scientific propagation, and the accredited rules and hoarded maxims of a host of horticultural journals at its back.

Or, to run still more upon fancy. A garden is a place where these two whilom foes—Nature and man—patch up a peace for the nonce. Outside the garden precincts—in the furrowed field, in the forest, the quarry, the mine, out upon the broad seas—the feud still prevails that began as our first parents found themselves on the wrong side of the gate of Paradise. But

"Here contest grows but interchange of love"—

here the old foes have struck a truce and are leagued together in a kind of idyllic intimacy, as is witnessed in their exchange of grace for grace, and the crowning touch that each puts upon the other's efforts.

The garden, I have said, is a sort of "betweenity"—part heaven, part earth, in its suggestions; so, too, in its make-up is it part Nature, part man: for neither can strictly say "I made the garden" to disregard the other's share in it. True, that behind all the contents of the place sits primalNature, but Nature "to advantage dressed," Nature in a rich disguise, Nature delicately humoured, stamped with new qualities, furnished with a new momentum, led to new conclusions, by man's skill in selection and artistic concentration. True, that the contents of the place have their originals somewhere in the wild—in forest or coppice, or meadow, or hedgerow, swamp, jungle, Alp, or plain hillside. We can run each thing to earth any day, only that a change has passed over them; what in its original state was complex or general, is here made a chosen particular; what was monotonous out there, is here mixed and contrasted; what was rank and ragged there, is here taught to be staid and fine; what had a fugitive beauty there, has here its beauty prolonged, and is combined with other items, made "of imagination all compact." Man has taken the several things and transformed them; and in the process, they passed, as it were, through the crucible of his mind to reappear in daintier guise; in the process, the face of Nature became, so to speak, humanised: man's artistry conveyed an added charm.

Judged thus, a garden is, at one and the same time, the response which Nature makes to man's overtures, and man's answer to the standing challenge of open-air beauty everywhere. Here they work no longer in a spirit of rivalry, but for the attainment of a common end. We cannot dissociate them in the garden. A garden is man's transcript of the woodland world: it is common vegetation ennobled: outdoor scenery neatly writ in man's small hand.It is a sort of twin-picture, conceived of man in the studio of his brain, painted upon Nature's canvas with the aid of her materials—a twin-essay where Nature's

... "primal mindThat flows in streams, that breathes in wind"

supplies the matter, man the style. It is Nature's rustic language made fluent and intelligible—Nature's garrulous prose tersely recast—changed into imaginative shapes, touched to finer issues.

"What is a garden?" For answer come hither: be Fancy's guest a moment. Turn in from the dusty high-road and noise of practical things—for

"Not wholly in the busy world, nor quiteBeyond it, blooms the garden that I love";

descend the octagonal steps; cross the green court, bright with great urns of flowers, that fronts the house; pass under the arched doorway in the high enclosing wall, with its gates traceried with rival wreaths of beaten iron and clambering sprays of jasmine and rose, and, from the vantage-ground of the terrace-platform where we stand, behold an art-enchanted world, where the alleys with their giddy cunning, their gentle gloom, their cross-lights and dappled shadows of waving boughs, make paths of fantasy—where the water in the lake quivers to the wind's soft footprints, or sparkles where the swallows dip, or springs in jets out of shapely fountain, or, oozing from bronze dolphin's mouth, slides down among moss-flecked stones into a deep dark pool, and is seen anon threading with still foot the careless-careful curvedbanks fringed with flowering shrubs and trailing willows and brambles—where the flowers smile out of dainty beds in the sunny ecstasy of "sweet madness"—where the air is flooded with fragrance, and the mixed music of trembling leaves, falling water, singing birds, and the drowsy hum of innumerable insects' wings.

"What is a garden?" It is man's report of earth at her best. It is earth emancipated from the commonplace. Earth is man's intimate possession—Earth arrayed for beauty's bridal. It is man's love of loveliness carried to excess—man's craving for the ideal grown to a fine lunacy. It is piquant wonderment; culminated beauty, that for all its combination of telling and select items, can still contrive to look natural, debonair, native to its place. A garden is Nature aglow, illuminated with new significance. It is Nature on parade before men's eyes; Flodden Field in every parish, where on summer days she holds court in "lanes of splendour," beset with pomp and pageantry more glorious than all the kings'.

"Why is a garden made?" Primarily, it would seem, to gratify man's craving for beauty. Behind fine gardening is fine desire. It is a plain fact that men do not make beautiful things merely for the sake of something to do, but, rather, because their souls compel them. Any beautiful work of art is a feat, an essay, of human soul. Someone has said that "noble dreams are great realities"—this in praise of unrealised dreams; but here, in the fine garden, is the noble dream and the great reality.

Here it may be objected that the ordinary garden is, after all, only a compromise between the common and the ideal: half may be for the lust of the eye, yet half is for domestic drudgery; half is for beauty, half for use. The garden is contrived "a double debt to pay." Yonder mass of foliage that bounds the garden, with its winding intervals of turf and look of expansiveness, it serves to conceal villadom and the hulking paper-factory beyond; that rock-garden with its developed geological formation, dotted over with choice Alpine plants, that the stranger comes to see. It is nothing but the quarry from whence the stone was dug that built the house. Those banks of evergreens, full of choice specimens, what are they but on one side the screen to your kitchen stuff, and on the other side, the former tenant's contrivance to assist him in forgetting his neighbour? Even so, my friend, an it please you! You are of those who, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, would sever a bee in two, if you could!

The garden, you say, is a compromise between the common and the ideal. Yet nobility comes in low disguises. We have seen that the garden is wild Nature elevated and transformed by man's skill in selection and artistic concentration—wild things to which man's art has given dignity. The common flowers of the cottager's garden tell of centuries of collaboration. The flowers and shrubs and trees with which you have adorned your own grounds were won for you by the curiosity, the aspiration, the patient roaming and ceaseless research of a longlist of old naturalists; the design of your garden, its picturesque divisions and beds, a result of the social sense, the faculty for refined enjoyment, the constructive genius of the picked minds of the civilised world in all ages. The methods of planting approved of to-day, carrying us back to the admirably-dressed grounds of the ancient castles and abbeys, to the love of woodland scenery, which is said to be a special characteristic of Teutonic people, which is evidenced in the early English ballads; to the slowly acquired traditions of garden-masters like Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Gilpin, and Repton, as well as to the idealised landscapes of Constable, Gainsborough, Linnell, and Turner; it is, in fact, the issue of the practical insight, the wood-craft, and idealistic skill of untold generations.

In this matter of floral beauty and garden-craft man has ever declared himself a prey to the "malady of the ideal"; the Japanese will even combine upon his trees the tints of spring and autumn.[8]But everywhere, and in all ages of the civilised world, man spares no pains to acquire the choicest specimens, the rarest plants, and to give to each thing so acquired the ideally best expression of which it is capable. It is as though Eden-memories stillhaunted the race with the solicitude of an inward voice that refused to be silenced, and is satisfied with nothing short of the best.

And yet, as some may point out, this homage of beauty that you speak of is not done for nought; there enters into gardening the spirit of calculation. A garden is a kind of investment. The labour and forethought man expends upon it must bring adequate return. For every flower-bed he lays down, for every plant, or shrub, or tree put into the ground, his word is ever the same,

"Be its beautyIts sole duty."

It was not simply to gratify his curiosity, to serve as a pretext for adventure, that the gardener of old days reconnoitred the globe, culled specimens, and spent laborious days in studying earth's picturesque points; it was with a view to the pleasure the things would ultimately bring. And why not! Had man not served so long an apprenticeship to Nature on her freehold estate, the garden would not so directly appeal to our imaginations and command our spirits. A garden reveals man as master of Nature's lore; he has caught her accents, rifled her motives; he has transferred her bright moods about his own dwelling, has tricked out an ordered mosaic of the gleanings of her woodland carpet; has, as it were, stereotyped the spontaneous in Nature, has entrapped and rendered beautifully objective the natural magic of the outer world to gratify the inner world of his own spirit.The garden is, first and last, made "for delectation's sake."

So we arrive at these conclusions. A garden is made to express man's delight in beauty and to gratify his instincts for idealisation. But, lest the explanation savour too much of self-interest in the gardener, it may be well to say that the interest of man's investment of money and toil is not all for himself. What he captures of Nature's revenues he repays with usury, in coin that bears the mint-mark of inspired invention. This artistic handling of natural things has for result "the world's fresh ornament,"[9]and for plant, shrub, or tree subject to it, it is the crowning and completion of those hiddenpossibilities of perfection that have lain dormant in them since the world began.

An artist has been defined as one who reproduces the world in his own image and likeness. The definition is perhaps a little high-flown, and may confer an autobiographical value to an artist's performances that would astonish none more than himself. Yet if the thought can be truthfully applied anywhere, it is where it occurred to Andrew Marvell—in a garden.

"The mind, that ocean where each kindDoes straight its own resemblance find;Yet it creates, transcending these,Far other worlds and other seas,Annihilating all that's madeTo a green thought in a green shade."

And where can we find a more promising sphere for artistic creation than a garden? Do we boast of fine ideas and perceptions of beauty and powers of design! Where can our faculties find a happier medium of expression or a pleasanter field for display than the garden affords? Nay, to have the ideas, the faculties, and the chance of their exercise and still to hold back were a sin! For a garden is, so to speak, the compliment a man of ideas owes to Nature, to his friends, and to himself.

Many are the inducements to gardening. Thus, if I make a garden, I need not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools, to prove myself an artist. Again, a garden is the only form of artistic creation that is bound by the nature of things to be more lovely in realisation than in the designer'sconception. It is no mere hint of beauty—no mere tickling of the fancy—that we get here, such as all other arts (except music) are apt to give you. Here, on the contrary, we are led straight into a world of actual delights patent to all men, which our eyes can see, and our hands handle. More than this; whilst in other spheres of labour the greater part of our life's toil and moil will, of a surety, end as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the end, our labour will be crowned with flowers.

Nor have I yet exhausted the scene of a garden's pleasures. A man gets undoubted satisfaction in the very expression of his ideas—"the joy of the deed"—in the sense of Nature's happy response, the delight of creation,[10]the romance of possibility.

Some joy shall also come of the identity of the gardener with his creation.[11]He is at home here. He is intimate with the various growths. He carries in his head an infinity of details touching the welfare of the garden's contents. He participates in the lifeof his plants, and is familiar with all their humours; like a good host, he has his eye on all his company. He has fine schemes for the future of the place. The very success of the garden reflects upon its master, and advertises the perfect understanding that exists between the artist and his materials. The sense of ownership and responsibility brings him satisfaction, of a cheaper sort. His the hand that holds the wand to the garden's magic; his the initiating thought, the stamp of taste, the style that gives it circumstance. Let but his hand be withdrawn a space, and, at this signal, the gipsy horde of weeds and briars—that even now peer over the fence, and cast clandestine seeds abroad with every favouring gust of wind—would at once take leave to pitch their tents within the garden's zone, would strip the place of art-conventions, and hurry it back to its primal state of unkempt wildness.

Someone has observed that when wonder is excited, and the sense of beauty gratified, there is instant recreation, and a stimulus that lifts one out of life's ordinary routine. This marks the function of a garden in a world where, but for its presence, the commonplace might preponderate; 'tis man's recreation ground, children's fairyland, bird's orchestra, butterfly's banquet. Verse and romance have done well, then, to link it with pretty thoughts and soft musings, with summer reveries and moonlight ecstasies, with love's occasion, and youth's yearning. No fitter place could well be found than this for the softer transactions of life that awakenlove, poesy, and passion. Indeed, were its winsomeness not balanced by simple human enjoyments—were its charmed silences not broken by the healthy interests of common daily life—the romps of children, the clink of tea-cups, the clatter of croquet-mallets, themêléeof the tennis-courts, the fiddler's scrape, and the tune of moving feet, it might well seem too lustreful a place for this work-a-day world.

Apart from its other uses, there is no spot like a garden for cultivating the kindly social virtues. Its perfectness puts people upon their best behaviour. Its nice refinement secures the mood for politeness. Its heightened beauty produces the disposition that delights in what is beautiful in form and colour. Its queenly graciousness of mien inspires the reluctant loyalty of even the stoniest mind. Here, if anywhere, will the human hedgehog unroll himself and deign to be companionable. Here friend Smith, caught by its nameless charm, will drop his brassy gabble and dare to be idealistic; and Jones, forgetful of the main chance and "bulls" and "bears," will throw the rein to his sweeter self, and reveal that latent elevation of soul and tendency to romance known only to his wife!

"There be delights," says an ancient writer, "that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream." This tells, in terse English, the pleasures of a garden and the instincts that are gratified in its making. For a garden is Arcady brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe—his well-disguised fiction ofan unvexed Paradise—standing witness of his quest of the ideal—his artifice to escape the materialism of a world that is too actual and too much with him. A well-kept garden makes credible to modern eyes the antique fable of an unspoiled world—a world where gaiety knows no eclipse, and winter and rough weather are held at bay. In this secluded spot the seasons slip by unawares. The year's passing-bell is ignored. Decay is cheated of its prize. The invading loss of cold, or wind, or rain—the litter of battered Nature—the "petals from blown roses on the grass"—the pathos of dead boughs and mouldering leaves, the blighted bloom and broken promise of the spring, autumn's rust or winter's wreckage are, if gardeners be brisk sons of Adam, instantly huddled out of sight, so that, come when you may, the place wears a mask of steady brightness; each month has its new dress, its fresh counterfeit of permanence, its new display of flowers or foliage, as pleasing, if not so lustrous as the last, that serves in turn to prolong the illusion and to conceal the secret irony and fond assumption of the thing.

"I think for to touche alsoThe world which neweth everie daie,So far as I can, so as I maie."

This snatch of Gower's rhyme expresses in old phrase the gardener's desire, or clothed in modern prose by Mr Robinson ("English Flower-Garden," Murray), it is "to make each place at various seasons, and in every available situation, an epitome of the great flower-garden of the world."

We hinted a moment ago of the interest that a garden gathers from the mark of man's regard and tendence; and if this be true of a modern garden, how much more true of an old one! Indeed, this is undeniable in the latter case, for Time is ever friendly to gardens. Ordinarily his attitude towards all that concerns the memories of man is that of a jealous churl. Look at history. What is history but one long record of men who, in this sphere or that, have toiled, striven, sold their souls even, to perpetuate a name and have their deeds written upon the tablets of eternity, not reckoning upon the "all oblivious enmity" of Time, who, with heedless hand, cuts their past into fragments, blots out their name, confuses their story, and frets with gnawing tooth each vestige of their handiwork. How, then, we ask—

"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,Whose action is no stronger than a flower?"

Yet so it is. He who has no respect for antique glories, who snaps his fingers at earth's heroes, who overturns the statues of the laurelled Cæsars, encrusts the hieroglyphics of the Pharaohs, and commits their storied masonry to the mercies of the modern Philistine, will make exception in a garden. "Time's pencil" helps a garden. In a garden not only are the solemn shapes and passing conceits of grey epochs treasured up, even to their minutest particulars, but the drift of the years, elsewhere so disastrous, serves only to heighten their fascination and power of appeal.

Thus it comes to pass, that it were scarcely possible to name a more pathetic symbol of the past than an old garden,[12]nor a spot which, by its tell-tale shapes, sooner lends itself to our historic sense if we would recall the forms and reconstruct the life of our ancestors. For we have here the very setting of old life—the dressed stage of old drama, the scenery of old gallantry. Upon this terrace, in front of these flower-beds with these trees looking on, was fought out the old battle of right and wrong—here was enacted the heroic or the shameful deeds, the stirring or the humdrum passages in the lives of so many generations of masters, mistresses, children, and servants, who in far-off times have lived, loved, and died in the grey homestead hard by. "Now they are dead," as Victor Hugo says—"they are dead, but the flowers last always."

Admit, then, that for their secret quality, no less than for their obvious beauty, these old gardens should be treasured. For they are far more than they seem to the casual observer. Like any other piece of historic art, the old garden is only truly intelligible through a clear apprehension of the circumstances which attended its creation. Granted that we possess the ordinary smattering of historicalknowledge, and the garden will serve to interpret the past and make it live again before our eyes. For the old place is (to use the journalist's phrase) an "object lesson" of old manners; it is a proof of ancient genius, a clue to old romance, a legacy of vague desire. The many items of the place—the beds and walks with their special trick of "style" the parterre, the promenoir, the maze, the quincunx, the terraces, the extravagances in ever-green sculptures of which Pope spoke—what are they but the mould and figure of old-world thought, down to its most characteristic caprice! The assertive air of these things—their prominence in the garden-scenery—bespeak their importance in the scenery of old life. It wasthusthat our forefathers made the world about them picturesque,thusthat they coloured their life-dreams and fitted an adjunct pleasure to every humour,thusthat they climbed by flower-strewn stairs to the realm of the ideal and stimulated their sense of beauty.

And if further proof be needed of the large hold the garden and its contents had of the affections of past generations, we have but to turn to the old poets, and to note how the texture of the speech, the groundwork of the thought, of men like Milton, Herrick, Vaughan, Herbert, Donne (not to mention prose-writers) is saturated through and through with garden-imagery.

In the case of an old garden, mellowed by time, we have, I say, to note something that goes beyond mere surface-beauty. Here we may expect to finda certain superadded quality of pensive interest, which, so far as it can be reduced to words, tells of the blent influences of past and present, of things seen and unseen, of the joint effects of Nature and Man. The old ground embodies bygone conceptions of ideal beauty; it has absorbed human thought and memories; it registers the bequests of old time. Dead men's traits are exemplified here. The dead hand still holds sway, the pictures it conjured still endure, its cunning is not forgotten, its strokes still make the garden's magic, in shapes and hues that are unchanged save for the slow moulding of the centuries.Really, not less than metaphorically, the garden-growths do keep green the memories of the men and women who placed them there, as the flower that is dead still holds its perfume. And few will say that the chronicles of the dead do not

"Shine more bright in these contentsThan unwept stone besmeared with sluttish time."

There is a wealth of quiet interest in an old garden. We feel instinctively that the place has been warmed by the sunshine of humanity; watered from the secret spring of human joy and sorrow. Sleeping echoes float about its glades; its leafy nooks can tell of felicities sweeter than the bee-haunted cups of flowers; of glooms graver than the midnight blackness of the immemorial yews. It is their suggestion of antique experiences that endues the objective elements in an old garden like Haddon, or Berkeley, or Levens, or Rockingham, with a strange eloquence. The recollections of many a child have centredround these objects: the one touch of romance in a narrow, simple life is linked with them. Hearts danced or hearts drooped in this vicinity. Eyes that brimmed over with laughter or that were veiled with tears looked on these things as we look on them now—drank in the shifting lights and shadows on the grass—watched the waving of the cedar's dark layers of shade against an angry sky, "stern as the unlashed eye of God," and all the birds were silent—once took in the sylvan vistas of trees, lawn, fir-ridge, the broad-water where the coots and moor-hens now play (as then) among the green lily-pads and floating weeds, regardless of Regulas in lead standing in their midst; once dwelt upon the lustrous flower-beds, on the sundial on the terrace—noonday rendezvous of fantails—on the "Alley of Sighs," with its clipped beeches, its grey-stone seat half-way down, its rustle of dying leaves, and traditions of intrigue; on the lime avenue full of perfume in the sweet-o'-the-year, on the foot-bridge across the moat, on the streak of blue autumn mist that tracks the stream in yonder meadows where the landrail is croaking, and that brings magically near the beat of hoofs, the jingle of horses' bells, the rumble of homeward wagons on the road, and whiffs of the reapers' songs; on the brief brilliance of the garden-panorama as the wintry-moon gives the black clouds the slip and suddenly discloses a white world of snow-muffled forms, that gleams with the eerie pallor of a ghost, and is as suddenly dissolved into darkness.

Simple sights, you will say, and familiar! and yet, when connected with some unique occasion, some epoch of a life, when seen on such a day, at such a supreme, all-absorbing moment from window, open door, terrace, arbour; in the stillness or in the wild rhetoric of the night, the familiar scene, momentarily flashed upon the brain's retina, may have subtly and unconsciously influenced the act, or coloured the thought of some human being, and the brand of that moment's impress may have accompanied that soul to the edge of doom.

Because of its hoarded memories we come to look upon an old garden as a sort of repository of old secrets; wrapped within its confines, as within the covers of a sacred book, repose so many pages of the sad and glad legend of humanity. We have before us the scenery of old home idylls, of old household reverences and customs, of old life's give and take—its light comedy or solemn farce, its dark tragedy, its summer masque, its stately dance or midnight frolic, its happy wedlock or its open sorrow, its endured wrong. The place is identified with the fortunes of old families: for so many generations has the old place been found favourable for lovers' tales, for youths' golden dreams, for girls' chime of fancy, for the cut and thrust of friendly wrangles, for the "leisures of the spirit" of student-recluse, for children's gambols and babies' lullabies. Seated upon this mossy bank, children have spelt out fairy tales, while birds, trees, brooks, and flowers listened together. The marvel of its cloistered grace has beenGod-reminder to the saint; its green recesses have served for Enoch's walk,[13]for poet's retreat; as refuge for the hapless victim of broken endeavour; as enisled shelter for the tobacco-loving sailor-uncle with a wrecked fame; as invalid's Elysium; as haunt of the loafing, jesting, unambitioned man ("Alas, poor Yorick!"); as Death's sweet ante-room for slow-footed age.

What wonder that Sir William Temple devised that his heart should rest where its memories were so deep-intrenched—in his garden; or that Waterton should ask to be buried between the two great oaks at the end of the lake! (Norman Moore's Introduction to "Wanderings in South America.")

And if human affections be, as the poets declare, immortal, we have the reason why an old garden, in the only sense in which it ever is old, by the almanack, has that whisper and waving of secrecy, that air of watchful intentness, that far-reaching, mythological, unearthly look, that effect of being a kind of twilighted space common to the two worlds of past and present. Who will not agree with me in this? It matters not when you go there—at dawn, at noonday, no less than when the sky is murky and night-winds are sighing—and although you shall be the only visible human being present, it is not alone that you feel. A thrill comes over you, a mysterious sense warns you that this is none otherthan the sanctuary of "the dead," as we call them; the place where, amid the hush of passionless existence, the wide leisure of uncounted time, the shades of once familiar presences keep their "tongueless vigil." They fly not at the "dully sound" of human footsteps; they ask no sympathy for regret which dare not tell the secret of its sorrow; but, with the gentle gait of old-world courtesy, they move aside, and when you depart resume occupation of ground which, for the sake of despairing wishes and memories of an uneffaced past, they may not quit. After life's fitful fever these waifs of a vanished world sleep not well; here are some consumed with covetousness, who are learning not to resent the word "mine" applied by the living owner of hall and garden, field and store; some that prey on withered bliss—the "bitter sweet of days that were"—this, the miser whose buried treasure lies undiscovered here, and who has nothing in God's bank in the other world; this, the author of the evil book; and this loveless, unlovely pair, the ruined and ruiner, yoked for aye; a motley band, forsooth, with "Satan's sergeants" keeping guard!

It is ever the indirect that is most eloquent. Someone says: Hence these tokens of a dead past open out vistas for one's imagination and drop hints of romance that would make thrilling reading in many volumes, but which shall never reach Mudie's.

Even Nature is not proof against the spell of anold garden. The very trees have an "ancient melody of an inward agony":

"The place is silent and awareIt has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes,But that is its own affair"—

even Nature forgets to be her cold, impassive self, and puts on a sympathetic-waiting look in a spot so intricately strewn and meshed over with the fibres of human experience. Long and close intimacy with mankind under various aspects—witness of things that happened to squires, dames, priests, courtiers, servitors, page, or country-maid, in the roundabout of that "curious, restless, clamorous being which we call life"—has somehow tinged the place with a sensibility (one had almost said awizardry) not properly its own. And this superadded quality reaches to the several parts of the garden and is not confined to the scene as a whole. Each inanimate item of the place, each spot, seems invested with a gift of attraction—to have a hidden tongue that could syllable forgotten names—to possess a power of fixing your attention, of fastening itself upon your mind, as though it had become, in a sense, humanised, and claimed kindred with you as related to that secret group with whose fortunes it was allied, with whose passions it had held correspondence, and were letting you know it could speak an if it would of

"All the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."

"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."Robert Browning.

"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."

Robert Browning.

In dealing with our second point—the ornamental treatment that is fit and right for a garden—we are naturally brought into contact with the good and bad points of both the old and the new systems of gardening. This being so, it may be well at once to notice the claims of the modern "Landscape-gardener" to monopolise to himself all the right principles of garden-craft: all other moods than his are low, all figures other than his are symbols of error, all dealings with Nature other than his are mere distortions.

If you have any acquaintance with books upon landscape-gardening written by its professors or their admirers, you will have learnt that in the first half of the eighteenth century, two heaven-directed geniuses—Kent and Brown—all of a sudden stumbled upon the green world of old England, and, perceiving its rural beauties, and the hitherto unexplored opportunities for ornamental display that the country afforded, these two put their heads together,and out of their combined cogitations sprang the English garden.

This, in brief, is what the landscape-gardener and his adherents say, and would have you believe; and, to prove their point, they lay stress upon the style of garden in vogue at the time Kent and Brown began their experiments, when, forsooth, traditional garden-craft was in its dotage and had lost its way in the paths of pedantry.

Should you, however, chance to have some actual knowledge of old gardens, and some insight into the principles which, consciously or unconsciously governed their making, it may occur to you to ask the precise points wherein the new methods claim to be different from the old, what sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of gardeners that were not shared by English gardeners from time immemorial. Are there, then,twoarts of gardening? or two sorts of Englishmen to please? Is not modern garden-craft identical with the old, so far, indeed, as it hath art enough to stand any comparison with the other at all?

Let us here point to the fact, that any garden whatsoever is but Nature idealised, pastoral scenery rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters not what the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an idealisation of Nature.Realnature exists outside the artist and apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an interpretation of the outside objects, or that which he adds to the objects. The garden gives imaginative formto emotions the natural objects have awakened in man. Theraison d'êtreof a garden is man's feeling theensemble.

One fine day you take your architect for a jaunt along a country-lane, until stopping shyly in front of a five-barred gate, over which is nailed an ominous notice-board, you introduce him to your small property, the site of your new house. It is a field very much like the neighbouring fields—at least, so think the moles, and the rooks, and the rabbits; not you, for here is to be your "seat" for life; and before you have done with it, the whole country far and near will be taught to look as though it radiated round the site and the house you will build upon it—an honour of which, truth compels me to say, the land betrays not the remotest presentiment just now!

The field in question may be flat or undulating, it may be the lap of a hillside, the edge of a moor, a treeless stretch of furrowed land with traces of "rude mechanical's" usage, or suggestions of mutton or mangels. The particular character of the place, or its precise agricultural past, matters not, however; suffice it to say that it is a bit of raw, and more or less ungroomed, Nature.

Upon this plain, unadorned field, you set your man of imagination to work. He must absorb both it and its whole surroundings into his brain, and seize upon all its capabilities. He must produce symmetry and balance where now are ragged outlines of hillocks and ridges. He must trim andcherish the trees here, abolish the tree there; enlarge this slope, level that; open out a partial peep of blue distance here, or a gleam of silver water there. He must terrace the slope, step by step, towards the stream at the base, select the sunniest spots for the flower-beds, and arrange how best the gardens at their varying levels shall be approached or viewed from the house. In this way and that he must so manœuvre the perspective and the lights and shades, so compose or continue the sectional lines and general bearings of the ground as to enforce the good points that exist, and draw out the latent possibilities of the place, and this with as easy a hand, and as fine tact as the man can muster.

And now to come to our point. A dressed garden, I said, is Nature idealised—pastoral scenery put fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is a master of what the French writer calls "the charming art of touching up the truth."

Emerson observes that all the Arts have their origin in some enthusiasm; and the art of gardening has for its root, man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees and landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to speak, passed from the stage of emotion to that of form. A garden is the result of the emulation which the vision of beauty in the world at large is ever provoking in man—

"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasuresWhile the landskip round it measures."

What of Nature has affected man on variousoccasions, what has pleased his eye in different moods, played upon his emotions, pricked his fancy, suggested reverie, stirred vague yearnings, brought a sense of quickened joy—pastoral scenery, the music of leaves and waters, the hues and sweetness of country flowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form of tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh, autumn's glow, summer's bravery, winter's grey blanched face—each thing that has gone home to him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania. Inspired by their beauty and mystery, he has gathered them to himself about his home, has made a microcosm out of the various detached details which sum up the qualities, features, and aspects of the open country; and the art of this little recreated world is measured by the happy union of naturalness and of calculated effect.

What sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of gardeners, I asked a moment ago, which were not shared by English gardeners from time immemorial? The art of gardening, I said, has its root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. See how closely the people of old days must have observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the embroidery of the meadows, the livery of the woods at different seasons, or they would not have been capable of building up that piece of hoarded loveliness, the old-fashioned English garden!

The pleasaunce of old days has been mostly stubbed up by the modern "landscape gardener," but if no traces of them were left we have still hereand there the well-schemed surroundings of our English homes—park, avenue, wood, and water—the romantic scenery that hems in Tintern, Fountains, Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the English for planting. If the tree, shrub, and flower be gone from the grounds outside the old Tudor mansion, there still remains the blue-green world in the tapestries upon the walls, with their airy landscapes of trees and hills, hanging-gardens, flower-beds, terraces, and embowered nooks—a little fantastical it may be, but none the less eloquent of appreciation of natural beauty not confined to the gardener, but shared by the artist-maid, who

... "with her neeld composesNature's own shape, of bird, branch, or berry,That even Art sisters the natural roses."

And should these relics be gone, we still have the books in the library, rich in Nature-allusion. The simple ecstasies of the early ballad in the opening stanzas of "Robin Hood and the Monk"—

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