VIII APOLOGIA PRO BAMBUSIS MEIS 199 
the acres of paving stones surrounded by balustrades, and 
bespattered by jets of greater or lesser size, which were dear 
to the French architects. In these stones there is no beauty 
and but one sermon—“ Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, 
vanity of vanities ; allis vanity.” Versailles is a wreck, and 
the rays of the Roi Soleil are extinguished for ever. 
In these heavy masses of masonry there is only dignity 
for those who admire that which is costly. The poetry of 
gardening lies in another direction. Who can conceive a 
Dryad making her home in an Orange-tree incased in a green 
wooden tub? What nymph who respects herself would bathe 
her dainty limbs among the glorified squirts of Sydenham ? 
Another test: Could a painter paint these formal gardens of 
ashlar? Could a poet find inspiration in them? Would 
Saint Bernard say of them what he said of the woodland, 
“ Aliquid amplius invenias in sylvis quam in libris” ? 
He who would lay out for himself a paradise—I use the 
word in old Parkinson’s' sense—cannot do better, having the 
needful leisure, than set out to drink in wisdom in Japan, 
Not in the Japanese gardens, for, as we shall see presently, 
nowhere is the gardener’s work more out of tune with Nature 
than in that country of paradoxes; but on the mountain side, 
in the dim recesses of the forest, by the banks of many a 
torrent, there the great silent Teacher has mapped out for our 
instruction plans and devices which are the living refutation 
of the heresies of stonemasonry. There are spots among the 
Hakoné Mountains, not to mention many other places, of 
which the study of a lifetime could hardly exhaust the 
1 Paradisi in sole Paradisus terrestris, etc. By John Parkinson, apothecary 
of London, 1629. 
