262 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



which is an object of pursuit. Why do you take such pains with 

 your garden or your park? You see to your walks, and turf, and 

 shrubberies ; to your trees and drives ; not as if you meant to 

 make an orchard of the one, or corn or pasture land of the other, 

 but because there is a special beauty in all that is goodly in 

 wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all together by art into 

 one shape, and grouped into one whole. The Idea of a University. 

 (Knowledge its own End.) 



VICTOR ^HOUGHT is a virgin and fruitful soil, whose products insist 



??8o2*i88$) on g rowm * n freedom, and, so to speak, by chance, 



' without arrangement, without being drilled into borders like 



the knots in one of Le Notre's classical gardens, or the flowers 



of language in a treatise on rhetoric. 



Let it not, however, be supposed that this freedom must beget 

 disorder ; quite the reverse. Let us expand our idea. 



Compare for an instant a royal garden of Versailles, well levelled, 

 well clipped, well swept, well raked, well gravelled, quite full of 

 little cascades, little basins, little groves, bronze tritons in cere- 

 monious dalliance with oceans pumped up at great cost from the 

 Seine, marble fauns wooing dryads allegorically imprisoned in a 

 multitude of conical yews, cylindrical laurels, spherical orange- 

 trees, elliptical myrtles, and other trees, whose natural form, too 

 trivial, no doubt, has been gracefully corrected by the gardener's 

 shears ; compare this garden, so extolled, with a primitive forest 

 of the New World, with its giant trees, its tall grasses, its deep 

 vegetation, its thousand birds of a thousand hues, its broad 

 avenues, where light and shadow play only upon the verdure, 

 its wild harmonies, its great rivers which drift along islands of 

 flowers, its stupendous waterfalls, over which hover rainbows ! We 

 will not say where is the magnificence ? Where is the grandeur ? 

 Where is the beauty? But simply: where is the order? where 

 is the disorder? 



In the one, fountains, imprisoned or diverted from their course, 

 gush from petrified gods, only to stagnate; trees transplanted 



