382 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



mongrel one, and their gods and goddesses became legion, and so families 

 of substance either engaged a priest on tramp or salaried him from one 

 of the temples, and they multiplied his hero statues and his gods and 

 goddesses in his garden according to the particular cult of their priest or 

 their own ideas. 



After all, it is not strange that a garden should be held both by 

 heathen and Christian nations to be in accord with the tenderest instincts 

 of mankind. " It is the purest of human pleasures." As one poet 

 sings ; — 



The kiss of the sun for pardon, 



The song of the birds for mirth, 

 We are nearer God's heart in the garden 



Than anywhere else on earth." 



There is here that which fosters those " thoughts which lie too deep for 

 tears." Purity, wise order, forms too exquisitely fine for the eye to trace, 

 vistas and avenues, and flowery ways which lead on without harshness 

 or retaliation but tenderest sympathy to the striving and cruel world 

 beyond, and yet again allow and foster that which is equally needful — 

 restful meditation. 



"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," says Keats ; yet this is the 

 aspiration which we know that nothing earth-born can attain. Even in 

 the garden, where we are nearer God's heart than anywhere else on earth, 

 it is only by glints and gleams that we see it. What springs of the earth 

 is earthy and dies with the earth ; beauty is not so much in the thing 

 itself as in the thoughts that spring therefrom, and as our mind is directed 

 amidst loveliness to a fairer region as to which all that is transient here 

 is but type and shadow, and where change and decay are not. This is the 

 problem the Greek and Roman minds struggled to express through the 

 labyrinths of philosophy and mythology, and their incarnated and deified 

 representations of thought as seen in their sculptures and gardens, and 

 their handiwork is the result, or rather all takes colour and shape 

 therefrom. 



I say it without any fear of contradiction that the religious, whether 

 mistaken or true, is the deepest and most serious impulse in man, even in 

 a material age like the present ; this and beauty are inseparable, and in 

 order to wisely design a garden these kindred impulses must flow 

 strong in you. As in many another instance we meet here a paradox, 

 for it is only as you know the impossibility of your efforts that you can 

 design effectively. It is said of Turner, the artist, that the more he 

 wrestled to convey the problems of light through the poor medium of 

 colour, the more he chuckled each time he was thwarted and defeated. 

 The uninitiated think we triumph by our successes, but whether artist, 

 architect, designer, poet, or whoever it is that seeks to simulate beauty, 

 when he knows himself he triumphs like Jacob of old, not by might of 

 wrestling, but in weakness crippled and clinging, and we by our defeats. 

 No glory to u%! 



No presentation or representation of beauty can be complete in itself. 

 Nothing material and no amount of what is material, no matter how 

 finely disposed and well ordered, is a finality ; it lacks continuance and 

 completeness, and therefore it lacks everything. No progression, in fact 



