542 SckelVs Landsca2^e-Gardening. 



raise their heads among the mossy walls, and make known their 

 antiquity. Such melancholy remains of past ages may very 

 suitably be erected in such situations, and the illusion thereby 

 will be much greater. 



11. Broad, frequented, and beautifully formed paths should 

 not lead to ruins, because they would be in contradiction with 

 the uninhabited and long deserted structures. Traces of carriage 

 roads, and narrow footpaths winding about through thickets, 

 which lead the traveller with difficulty to these venerable remains 

 of antiquity, are much more suitable. 



12. Monuments erected to the memory of virtuous persons, or 

 those who are dear to us, may form an ornament of the garden, 

 and awaken in us the most lively recollections ; but I am not of 

 opinion that gardens ought to be the actual place of burial, 

 although many examples can be given of persons being buried 

 there. The peculiar intention of a garden is rather that it should 

 enliven and amuse us, than disturb and distress us by the 

 transience and destructibility of all that is temporal. 



The amiable Countess Louisa von Erbach (born Princess of 

 Leiningen), the ornament of her sex both in mind and person, 

 died in the year 1785, far from her paternal home. Her now 

 deceased father, the worthy German Prince of Leiningen Tiirk- 

 heim, who loved the deceased with the greatest tenderness, had 

 a monument erected in his garden at Tiirkheim in memory of 

 her imperishable virtues and affectionate memory. It consisted 

 of two sorrowful females in the greatest affliction carrying an urn 

 on a bier, which seemed to contain the beloved remains of the 

 deceased, back to her father in his garden at Tiirkheim. A pall 

 covers the bier and part of the urn, as far as where the name of 

 Louisa is engraved, after which is the following inscription : — 

 " Stop here maidens, set down the urn, that it may receive the 

 lamentations of the deceased's father in the sacred grove." * 

 A rock is situated on one side overshadowed by a weeping willow, 

 ready to receive the urn, and a sacred grove of slender poplars 

 veils the whole in a solemn shade. Such was this monument, 

 which is said to have been destroyed during the French re- 

 volution. 



A mere simple urn, by the side of a murmuring brook, over- 

 shadowed by a weeping willow, and sacred to the memory of a 

 friend or a faithful spouse, whose ashes repose at a distance, is also 

 very suitable, as we can here lament the irreparable loss with 

 that tender, noble, and spiritual feeling of love and friendship, 

 without these being embittered by sensations of a coarser and 

 more unpleasant kind, from the presence of the corruptible 

 remains. 



* If I am not mistaken, this inscription is by Gothe. 



