" The chief part, perhaps the whole, of that still obviously limited per- 

 Nature ception of harmony and beauty which humanity has succeeded in 

 of thing's " saving out of a not very attractive past, and which it hands on 

 as its legacy, to serve as the torch-bearer for the future. 



And yet, when all has been said, how fragmentary 

 such impressions are ; how unsatisfactory even to ourselves ; 

 things plucked at random from the void, and hardly suggestive 

 save to some mind that can eke out the blanks from its own 

 personal resources. It is one of the irritating sides of this 

 art of ours of writing that all the best and most vivid of our 

 mental impressions have a genius for evaporating during the 

 process ; of slipping away into some back region of the brain, 

 whence they decline to emerge, however urgently they may be 

 requested to do so. Glancing, as some fast-flying bird might 

 do, with a swift glance from one familiar scene to another, 

 a whole crowd of suggestive images present themselves, each 

 with its own proper form and comeliness ; each with its colours 

 and fragrance ; its own peculiar and wholly individual charm. 

 Reduce these things, however, to words, and that charm 

 flies, as surely as it flies from some handful of gaily-coloured 

 seaweed which you may have carried indoors with you from 

 the beach. Either, as in this case of gardens, the record turns 

 into something as trite and arid as a nurseryman's catalogue, or it 

 fritters itself away into a mere dim haze of impressions, as pale 

 and devoid of proper outlines as some scene visited by you 

 in the course of a dull afternoon's snooze ! It is probably 

 an unavoidable part of what we are in the habit of calling 

 " the nature of things " that it should be so, but I fail to see 

 that a recognition of that fact tends to make it any pleasanter ! 



EMILY LAWLESS. 



26 



