IN PRAISE OF BOTH. 209 



fresher than the garland of the other, but it was 

 gathered on loftier heights ; it means more, it implies 

 a more emphatic homage. 



And Wordsworth had not that superficial know- 

 ledge of gardening which no gentleman's head 

 should be without. He knew it as a craftsman knows 

 the niceties of his craft. " More than one seat in the 

 lake-country," says Mr Myres (" Wordsworth," p. 

 68), " among them one home of pre-eminent beauty, 

 have owed to Wordsworth no small part of their 

 ordered charm." 



Of Wordsworth's own garden, one writes : " I 

 know that thirty years ago that which struck me 

 most at Rydal Mount, and which appeared to me its 

 greatest charm, was the union of the garden and the 

 wilderness. You passed almost imperceptibly from 

 the trim parterre to the noble wood, and from the 

 narrow, green vista to that wide sweep of lake and 

 mountain which made up one of the finest landscapes 

 in England. Nor could you doubt that this unusual 

 combination was largely the result of the poet's own 

 care and arrangement He had the faculty for such 

 work." 



Here one may well leave the matter without 

 further labouring, content to have proved by the 

 example of a four-square, sane genius, that those 

 instincts of ours which seem to pull contrary ways 

 Art-wards or Nature- wards and to drive our lop- 

 sided selves to the falsehood of extremes, are, after 

 all, not incompatible. The field, the waste, the moor, 

 the mountain, the trim garden with its parterres and 



o 



