204 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



" prefers the oppression of surroundings over-sadly 

 tinged, and solitudes that have a lonely face, sug- 

 gesting tragical possibilities to the old-fashioned 

 sort of beauty called charming and fair." 



The lesson we have to learn is the falsehood of 

 extremes. The point we have to master is, that in 

 the prodigality of " God's Plenty " many sorts of 

 beauty are ours, and nothing shall be scorned. 

 God's creation has a broad gamut, a vast range, 

 to meet our many moods. " There are, it may be, 

 so many kinds of music in the world, and none of 

 them is without signification." 



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



There is nothing contradictory in the variety and 

 multiformity of Nature, whether loose and at large 

 in Nature's unmapped geography, or garnered and 

 assorted and heightened by man's artistry in the 

 small proportions of a perfect garden. Man, we 

 said, is of mixed blood, whose sympathies are not so 

 much divided as double, and each sympathy shall 

 have free play. My inborn Eden instincts draw me 

 to the bloom and wonder of the world ; my Viking 

 blood drives me to the snap and enthusiasm of 

 anarchic forms, the colossal images, the swarthy 

 monotony, the sombre aspects of Nature in the 

 wild. "Yet all is beauty." 



Thus much by way of preamble. And now, after 

 repeating that the gardener of the old formality, 

 however sternly he discipline wild Nature for the 

 purposes of beauty, is none the less capable of loving 



