“The chief part, perhaps the whole, of that still obviously limited per- 
Nature ception of harmony and beauty which humanity has succeeded in 
of things” saving out of a not very attractive past, and which it hands on 
as its legacy, to serve as the torch-bearer for the future. 
And yet, when all has been said, how fragmentary 
such impressions are; how unsatisfactory even to ourselves; 
things plucked at random from the void, and hardly suggestive 
save to some mind that can eke out the blanks from its own 
personal resources. It is one of the irritating sides of this 
art of ours of writing that all the best and most vivid of our 
mental impressions have a genius for evaporating during the 
process; of slipping away into some back region of the brain, 
whence they decline to emerge, however urgently they may be 
requested to do so. Glancing, as some fast-flying bird might 
do, with a swift glance from one familiar scene to another, 
a whole crowd of suggestive images present themselves, each 
with its own proper form and comeliness; each with its colours 
and fragrance; its own peculiar and wholly individual charm. 
Reduce these things, however, to words, and that charm 
flies, as surely as it flies from some handful of gaily-coloured 
seaweed which you may have carried indoors with you from 
the beach. Either, as in this case of gardens, the record turns 
into something as trite and arid as a nurseryman’s catalogue, or it 
fritters itself away into a mere dim haze of impressions, as pale 
and devoid of proper outlines as some scene visited by you 
in the course of a dull afternoon’s snooze! It is probably 
an unavoidable part of what we are in the habit of calling 
“the nature of things” that it should be so, but I fail to see 
that a recognition of that fact tends to make it any pleasanter ! 
Emity Law.ess. 
26 
