HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 
time the panorama of radiant splendour that stretched before my 
dazzled and delighted eyes. I can just recall that all colour was 
eliminated, and there was nothing left but light. The town, with 
its covered bridges, was behind me; the twin towers and pointed 
spires of the cathedral to the left ; but all this I found out later— 
I observed no details, and of anything that was going on down below 
in the foreground, I took no heed—all that I carried away with me, 
all that remains in my memory to this day, was the broad impres- 
sion of a world of glittering, dancing, silvery light, sparkling water, 
and gleaming snowy peaks. Of course no feeble words of mine 
could paint it, then or now, but—and herein lies my point— 
neither could Sir Walter Scott’s. It was the record of a poet-painter’s 
impression that was wanted. But no impressionist below the rank 
of Turner could have touched it; and better, far better, a feeble 
effort in words, that we have all been taught to lisp, and that, how- 
ever halting, are not without suggestiveness to one who has passed 
through similar experiences—than the amateur artist’s daring 
attempt to paint the unpaintable—to rush in—to clamber Alps, 
where we find the pebbles difficult ! 
I cannot paint Alps; no, nor sketch them—but I think I can 
paint gardens—and possibly what my brush fails to explain, my 
pen may help to elucidate. And just as it is the painter’s supreme 
joy to seize the passing impression and paint it with such force and 
truth as is in him—so it is also his solemn duty and his high voca- 
tion. Every artist recognizes this, and knows the vital and insistent 
call for self-expression—at every hour, at every moment; and if 
life were not so short, and its many uncongenial tasks so long, 
there would be more evidence of this fact in the world around us. 
And since, as I said before, many things that cannot be described 
in words are of the very essence of the loveliness of gardens, particu- 
larly of large gardens, how can bare words, and one drawing only, 
convey the dignity and charm of the grounds of Holland House ?, 
Of the long, straight rose-walk in the north garden before referred 
to—grassy, not gravelled, and bordered on either side by roses that 
are all pink—though when I beheld it in August, its beauty had 
somewhat departed ; of the pleasing effect, in the Japanese Garden, 
of the miniature ponds and pools, fringed, and filled with all manner 
of foreign aquatic plants—rising, as it were in low steps, to the higher 
ground; and of the interest of the curious exotic shrubs to be 
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