286 The Wardian Case. 



resource. What landscape-gardener can produce a more charming land- 

 scape than I have in my little garden ? I am as good a landscape-maker as 

 the best of them with my little plot. My landscape will show close obser- 

 vation and aesthetic symmetry. The exquisite loveliness of vegetable life is 

 impressed upon every inch of it. The vivid green of perpetual spring is 

 there. Youth is the season of beauty, and only the month of April can 

 call into being such vegetable youth as my Wardian Case enshrines. 



But I cannot leave this theme without using the words of an aesthetic 

 writer who discourses so eloquently upon the influence of pictures in our 

 homes. My Wardian Case is one of my pictures, and aesthetically belongs 

 to the same category. All that he says of pictures will bear with equal 

 force upon my Wardian Case- Listen as follows : — 



" A room with pictures in it, and a room without pictures, differ by 

 nearly as much as a room with windows, and a room without windows. 

 Nothing, we think, is more melancholy, particularly to a person who has 

 to pass much time in his room, than blank walls with nothing on them ; 

 for pictures are loopholes of escape to the soul, leading it to other spheres. 

 It is such an inexpressible relief to the person engaged in writing, or even 

 reading, on looking up, not to have his line of vision chopped square off 

 by an odious white wall, but to find his soul escaping, as it were, through 

 the frame of an exquisite picture, to other beautiful and perhaps idyllic 

 scenes, where the fancy for a moment may revel, refreshed and delighted. 

 Is it winter in your world ? Perhaps it is summer in the picture. What 

 a charming momentary change and contrast ! And thus pictures are con- 

 solers of loneliness ; they are a sweet flattery to the soul ; they are a relief 

 to the jaded mind ; they are windows to the imprisoned thought ; they are 

 books ; they are histories and sermons, which we can read without the 

 trouble of turning over the leaves." George B. Warren, Jun. 



Troy, N.Y., March i, 1867. 



