OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN 



and more of summer suns and winter frosts, And these 

 monumental streams are beyond compare more beautiful 

 than their prototypes of Versailles and the copies erected 

 in other Continental residences in imitation of the Grand 

 Regne manner. This Lepautre was a man of fine power, 

 in the style of his age. But he had also the servile fawning 

 mind of that age. Soon after the triumph of the St. Cloud 

 Park, he could find it in him to die in three days of 

 jaundiced envy because some other design of his had 

 been passed over by the King's eye in favour of one 

 by Mansard ! Yea, to die of heart-burning, even as that 

 greater man, Jean Racine, who, some years later, gave up 

 the ghost in despair over a harsh remark passed by his 

 royal master in a fit of temper/ even as Vatel, the 

 maitre d'hotel, who fell upon his sword, and put an 

 end to a life dishonoured by the failure of the fish at the 

 celebrated Chantilly banquet ! 



Yes, the old cascade, at least, was still there, that once 

 had filled the five-year-old's imagination with a sense of 

 the supreme in earthly grandeur. The Jet Geant, also/ 

 that spouting jet that reaches a height of ... but no, 

 why cramp the stupendous into figures? Figures are 

 finite things. The shaft of hissing water, in those days 

 of confident wondering, reached the limit of the con- 

 ceivable before it fell down again, in its thundering 

 showers, through the iridescent bow, the arc-en-cre/, 

 that could always be looked for when the sun shone 

 on it at the sinking hour. But, alas, for the middle- 

 aged visitor who sought for a taste again, however 

 transient, of the noisy joyousness, the brilliance, the 

 colour, locked up in memory's casket! . . . The cidevant 

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