[Illustration: PERSPECTIVE VIEW OF A DESIGN FOR A GARDEN, WITH CLIPPED YEW HEDGES AND FLOWER BEDS.]
Your garden, gentle reader, is perchance not yet made. It were indeed happiness if, when good things betide you, and the time is ripe for your enterprise, Art
... "Shall say to thee I find you worthy, do this thing for me."
"I am tired of civilised Europe, and I want to see a wild country if I can."--W. R. GREG.
"Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!"--TENNYSON.
We have discussed the theory of a garden; we have analysed the motives which prompt its making, the various treatments of which it is susceptible; we have made a kind of inventory of its effects, its enchantments, its spendthrift joys. Now we will hear the other side, and find out why the morbid, tired man, the modern Hamlet, likes it not, why the son of culture loathes it as a lack-lustre thing, betokening to him the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. Having made our picture now we will turn it round, and note why it is that the garden, with its full complement of approved ornament, its selected vegetation, its pretty turns for Nature, its many-sided beauty--
"Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern was there Not less than truth designed"
Your garden will serve you in many ways. It will give a sense of household warmth to your home. It will smile, or look grave, or be dreamily fanciful almost at your bidding. If your bent be that way it will minister to your imaginative reverie, and almost surfeit you with its floods of lazy music. If you are hot, or weary, or dispirited, or touched with _ennui_, its calm atmosphere will lay the dust and lessen the fret of your life. Yet--let us not blink the fact--just because _all_ Nature is not represented here; because the girdle of the garden walls narrows our view of the world at large, and excludes more of Nature's physiognomy than it includes; because the garden is, as Sir Walter truly says, entirely "a child of Art"; the place, be it never so fair, falls short of man's imaginative craving, and, when put to the push, fails to supply the stimulus his varying moods require. Art's sounding-line will never fathom human nature's emotional depths.