264 SOME FAMOUS GARDENS 



who was not struck with that part of it which I 

 have here mentioned. 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 



POPE'S GARDEN AT TWICKENHAM 



(From a Letter to Edward Blount, Esq.) 



LET the young ladies be assured I make nothing 

 new in my gardens without wishing to see the print 

 of their fairy steps in every part of them. I have 

 put the last hand to my works of this kind, in 

 happily finishing the subterraneous way and grotto : 

 I there found a spring of the clearest water, which 

 falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes thro' the cavern 

 day and night. From the river Thames, you see 

 thro' my arch up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind 

 of open temple, wholly composed of shells in the 

 rustic manner, and from that distance under the 

 temple you look down thro' a sloping arcade of 

 trees, and see the sails on the river passing suddenly 

 and vanishing, as thro' a perspective glass. When 

 you shut the doors of this grotto, it becomes on the 

 instant, from a luminous room, a camera obscura ; 

 on the walls of which all the objects of the river, 

 hills, woods, and boats, are forming a moving 

 picture in their visible radiations : and when you 

 have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very 

 different scene ; it is finished with shells inter- 

 spersed with pieces of looking-glass in angular 

 forms ; and in the ceiling is a star of the same 

 material, at which, when a lamp (of an orbicular 



