Photography of Flowers 141 
no cloud floated across the sky. The landscape with its white 
sandy road, losing itself in a weird blackened forest of half- 
charred turpentine pines, clothed knee high with flaming red 
underbrush of scrub oak, was as lifeless as a painted canvas, 
and I became sceptical of my own reality. The longer I sat 
the more fantastic and improbable did the trees and sky and 
my own existence seem. It was with an effort that I shook off 
the illusion, and dropped back into a living active world, 
where every leaf must act its part, if it be no more than to 
twinkle and coquet with the wind, where birds must flutter 
by and sing, and clouds float, and distant hammers and 
voices ring, and dogs and poultry utter their cry to keep men 
sane and normal. We must have action and sound, else Na- 
ture oppresses us as a bad dream of the night where nothing 
moves, nor is anything brought to pass. 
Only when we try our apprentice hand in the faulty use of 
‘such a force as light in photography, instead of dense matter, 
do we realize how subtile, how powerful any force is, how in- 
violable are the results. We may blunder and patch up a mis- 
take with matter; but a mistaken application of force is ir- 
remediable and destructive. Any thoughtful experiment 
leads us to the threshold of almost unimaginable speculations 
about the conditions when, as disembodied spirits, ages hence, 
we shall be liberated forever from the limitations of matter, 
and sometime be entrusted with the use of these sublimated 
agents—forces—not destructively and experimentally, but 
constructively. How shall we build, when we employ thought 
instead of brick and stone? What shall our gardens be, when 
we use the life principle instead of plants? What shall we 
communicate, when we send forth musical vibratory color in- 
stead of dense thought or still grosser words ? 
When we study a garden for its photographic possibilities, 
we see a thousand things before unobserved, and in new rela- 
