208 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



done all, said all that inspired imagination can say in 

 her praise, in what seems an outburst of disloyalty 

 to his old mistress, he deliberately takes the crown 

 himself had woven from off the head of Nature and 

 places it on the brows of Art in a garden ! 



Not Bacon himself could write with more dis- 

 cernment or with more fervour of garden-craft than 

 this, and the pronouncement gains further signifi- 

 cance as being the deliberately expressed opinion of a 

 great poet, and him the leader of the modern School 

 of Naturalists. And that these two men, separated 

 not merely by two centuries of time, but by the 

 revolutionary influences which coloured them, should 

 find common ground and shake hands in a garden, is 

 strange indeed ! Both men loved Nature. Bacon, as 

 Dean Church remarks,^ had a " keen delight in 

 Nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the 

 charm of open-air life ; " but his regard for Nature's 

 beauties was not so ardent, his knowledge of her 

 works and ways not so intimate or so scientifically 

 verified, his senses not so sympathetically allured as 

 Wordsworth's ; he had not the same prophet's vision 

 that could see into the life of things, and find 

 thoughts there " that do often lie too deep for tears." 

 That special sense Wordsworth himself fathered. 



Points like these add weight to Wordsworth's 

 testimony of the high rank of gardening, and we do 

 well to note that the wreath that the modern man 

 brings for Art in a garden is not only greener and 



* " Bacon," English Men of Letters Series, R. W. Church. 



