274 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



The mood of the circle is the mood we should feel, 

 it seems to me, when we stand by a sun-dial. That is 

 the instinct of most people, I fancy, for dials are most 

 often placed where the garden rings them and they are 

 at the focus. A dial huddled up against a wall or set 

 at the end of the enclosure never seems quite right. 

 After all, it has no utilitarian use to-day, it is a sym- 

 bol of our tribute to the sun, and it should be where the 

 sunshine seems to concentrate, so that standing be- 

 side it we may remove our hat, fill our lungs, and feel 

 that delicious sensation of warm expansion. In my 

 ideal garden I would wish to glimpse from the dial a 

 vista of the horizon to the four points of the compass, 

 certainly to east and west, that I might be aware of 

 the world rim and of the great inverted dome of the 

 sky, with its blue intensity and its lazy cloud flotillas 

 riding to the zenith directly over the crown of my 

 head. Then, though my garden were set in lowly places, 

 I would know for an instant the mood of the peak! 



The natural landscape, of course, is seldom a matter 

 of one line exclusively. Only at the base of a preci- 

 pice or on the naked prairie is the vertical or the hori- 

 zontal supreme. The earth's contours are full of broken 

 lines, of curves and swells, which give contrast and 

 variety, and because they are physiographically so 

 interrelated they flow one into the other. Even the 

 precipice meets the valley floor not with a right angle 

 but the lovely curve of debris. To a certain extent 



