THE FIELD AND THE GARDEN 



It must have been observed by every careful student 

 of nature that our walks in the field and in the garden 

 are not attended by the same sensations. Indeed, they 

 always remind me of prose and verse, the one marked by 

 uniformity, the other by variety. The words and images 

 of prose are more ample and free, those of verse more 

 select and condensed. We look for assorted profusion in 

 the garden, for scattered multiplicity in the field. We 

 can sustain our interest a longer time when rambling over 

 the fields of prose ; but the luxury of a few moments is 

 greater when traversing the garden-walks of a short poem. 

 We see more beauty, more splendor, more that gratifies 

 the sense, in the garden ; we discover more of the pictu- 

 resque, more sublimity, more that excites the imagination, 

 in the field. But the dreary monotony and artificial 

 grandeur of a widely extended landscape garden must be 

 as tiresome as a long poem ; its serpentine paths, rus- 

 tic devices, and shallow imitations of nature's wildness 

 failing in their intentions, as the affected ruggedness and 

 hobbling of the verse and the frequent episodes of a long 

 poem are but a mockery of the freedom of prose. 



People who have been confined a great part of their 

 life to the town know very little of flowers, except as 

 the ornaments of a garden, and have admired them 

 chiefly as objects of art. Florists' flowers are generally 

 deprived of some of their specific characters : stamens are 

 transformed into petals, as in roses ; wheel-shaped flowers 

 in the margin take the place of bell-shaped flowers in the 



