298 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



with fruit-trees, with gooseberry bushes to give the first buds of 

 leaves, and let there be slender flowers all along the edges, and a 

 concourse of standard rose-trees for the sake of gathering the 

 roses, peas in rows and rows, with the twigs they grow upon 

 delicate against the light ; all gentle and fortunate and useful. 



How has the world so long taken so much trouble to make less 

 lovely things out of those fine materials — the blossoming earth and 

 the fostering sky ? Pity is it that the word garden should so be 

 vulgarized by worldly gardens. It is an early word to all men, 

 one of the earliest of words. It is an Orient word, fresh and 

 perpetual from childhood and the Divine East. A garden of 

 olives, a garden of cucumbers, a garden of herbs, a vineyard, a 

 garden enclosed — all these have the gravity of use and labour, and 

 are as remote as memory, and as familiar, secluded, and secret. 



— vVWv— 



HENRY A. /^NEof the srreatest ornaments to a garden is a fountain, but 

 BRIGHT v / • 



• ^-^ many fountains are curiously ineffective. A fountain is most 



beautiful when it leaps high into the air, and you can see it against 

 a background of green foliage. To place a fountain among low 

 flower-beds, and then to substitute small fancy jets that take the 

 shape of a cup, or trickle over into a basin of gold-fish, or toy with 

 a gilded ball, is to do all that is possible to degrade it. The real 

 charm of a fountain is, when you come upon it in some little grassy 

 glade of the ' pleasaunce,' where it seems as though it sought, in 

 the strong rush of its waters, to vie with the tall boles of the forest- 

 trees that surround it. Such was the fountain in Leigh Hunt's 

 Story of Rimini^ which shot up ' beneath a shade of darksome 

 pines,' 



' And 'twixt their shafts you saw the water bright, 

 Which through the tops glimmered with show'ring light.' 



One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost 

 entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had 



