Photography of Flowers 141 



no cloud floated across the sky. The landscape with its white 

 sandy road, losing itself in a weird blackened forest of half- 

 charred turpentine pines, clothed knee high with flaming red 

 underbrush of scrub oak, was as lifeless as a painted canvas, 

 and I became sceptical of my own reality. The longer I sat 

 the more fantastic and improbable did the trees and sky and 

 my own existence seem. It was with an effort that I shook off 

 the illusion, and dropped back into a living active world, 

 where every leaf must act its part, if it be no more than to 

 twinkle and coquet with the wind, where birds must flutter 

 by and sing, and clouds float, and distant hammers and 

 voices ring, and dogs and poultry utter their cry to keep men 

 sane and normal. We must have action and sound, else Na- 

 ture oppresses us as a bad dream of the night where nothing 

 moves, nor is anything brought to pass. 



Only when we try our apprentice hand in the faulty use of 

 such a force as light in photography, instead of dense matter, 

 do we realize how subtile, how powerful any force is, how in- 

 violable are the results. We may blunder and patch up a mis- 

 take with matter; but a mistaken application of force is ir- 

 remediable and destructive. Any thoughtful experiment 

 leads us to the threshold of almost unimaginable speculations 

 about the conditions when, as disembodied spirits, ages hence, 

 we shall be liberated forever from the limitations of matter, 

 and sometime be entrusted with the use of these sublimated 

 agents forces not destructively and experimentally, but 

 constructively. How shall we build, when we employ thought 

 instead of brick and stone ? What shall our gardens be, when 

 we use the life principle instead of plants? What shall we 

 communicate, when we send forth musical vibratory color in- 

 stead of dense thought or still grosser words ? 



When we study a garden for its photographic possibilities, 

 we see a thousand things before unobserved, and in new rela- 



