320 
Rustic Adornments. 
The subject cannot well be kept within a narrow compass, but we shall take 
care to say only a small part of all that will occur to us as we go on, for to 
deal with it thoroughly we should need hundreds of pages and thousands of 
designs, and a few years of luxurious leisure to bring our ideas to a measure- 
able focus. “ We aim above the mark to hit the mark,” says Emerson ; be it 
ours, in this short essay, to aim below the mark lest we hit it too hard, drive 
it into illimitable space, and regret too late our earnestness, and abandon it. 
Sweet Horace gives the cue for the essayist of the moderate persuasion— 
Pindarum quisquis studet asmulari, etc. 
Summer-houses, good friends, may be regarded as simply useful, as simply 
ornamental, or as combining both these qualities. Our own peculiar idea about 
them is that if they are not useful, they are but as stored up firewood, no 
matter how beautiful in appearance, or how much they may have cost. To 
begin with the most obvious uses, a summer-house should be adapted for rest, 
shelter, meditation, conversation, reading, observation, and perhaps conviviality. 
Our own out-door sanctum serves all these purposes, and more. For very 
many years past all our literary work—and it amounts to something as the 
year runs round—so long as weather permitted has been accomplished in a 
summer-house, and we are now building a little cottage by the side of a stream 
in a grass field, on a spot shaded by a glorious clump of trees, wherein there 
will be accommodation for a few hives of bees, with a snug room set apart 
for books, papers, gossip the fragrant weed; as an observatory, too, for shelter 
while star gazing; and as an auditorium into which the skylarks, thrushes, 
and nightingales will gladly “pour their vernal strains.” 
In this sweet haunt, thy blissful life 
Shall glide, like meadow-streamlet flowing 
Unreach’d by sounds of demon strife, 
U nknown to passion and unknowing ; 
For thee the fragrant airs shall rise, 
For thee shall bloom those opening roses; 
Till far beyond yon trembling skies, 
Thy heart in endless peace reposes. 
Gerald Griffin. 
Where shady trees invite the wanderer to a seat, how pleasant it is to find 
the means of rest and shelter in a garden. What more delightful when the 
