162 Gardening as an Art of Design and Taste. 



appearance of spontaneously growing from amongst weeds and 

 briars. Here, in fine, if we have a mind to secure the cool 

 shade and the convenient shelter of lofty trees, we can only 

 plant an avenue, we cannot form a forest. And for whati-eason, 

 since we admire, even to an excess, symm.etry of lines and dis- 

 position in that production of art called a house, we should 

 abhor these attributes in the same excess in that other avowed 

 production of art, the immediate appendage of the former, and 

 consequently the sharer in its purposes and character, namely, 

 the garden, I do not understand. 



There is between the various divisions of the house and those 

 of the gi'ounds this difference, that the first are more intended 

 for repose, and the latter for exercise, that the first are under 

 cover, and the latter exposed. This difference should make a 

 corresponding difference in the nature of the materials, and in 

 the size and delicacy of the forms ; but why it should occasion 

 on the one side an unqualified admission, and on the other as 

 unqualified an exclusion, of those attributes of symmetry and 

 correspondence of parts which may be equally produced ia 

 coarser as in finer materials, on a vaster as on a smaller scale, I 

 cannot conceive. The outside of the house is exposed to the 

 elements as well as the grounds ; and why, while columns are 

 thought invariably to look well at regular distances, trees 

 should be thought invariably to look ill in regular rows, is what 

 I cannot comprehend. Assuredly the difference is as great 

 between the eruptions of Etna or of any other volcano and 

 artificial fireworks, as it is between the falls of the Niagara or of 

 any other river and artificial waterworks. Why then, while 

 we gaze with admiration on a rocket, should we behold with 

 disgust a jet-d'eau ? And why, while we are delighted with a 

 rain of fiery sparks, should we be displeased with a shower of 

 liquid diamonds issuing from a beautiful vase, and again col- 

 lected in as exquisite a basin ? If the place be appropriate, if 

 the hues be vivid, if the outlines be elegant, if the objects be 

 varied and contrasted, in the name of wonder, how should, out 

 of all these partial elements of positive unmixed beauty, arise a 

 whole positively ugly ? No, there can only arise a whole as 

 beautiful as the parts ; and so those travellers who have not 

 allowed any narrow and exclusive theories to check or destroy 

 their spontaneous feelings, must own they have thought many of 

 the suspended gardens within Genoa and of the splendid villas 

 about Rome : so they have thought those striking oppositions of 

 the rarest marbles to the richest verdure ; those mixtures of 

 statues, and vases, and balustrades, with cypresses, and pinasters, 

 and bays; those distant hills seen through the converging lines 

 of lengthened colonnades ; those ranges of aloes and cactuses 

 growing out of vases of granite and of porphyry, scarce more 



