Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/439

 More spacious than a garden, less extensive than a chase, the reclaimed wild is unique in form and design as in floral loveliness. It combines the colour-glories of the garden proper with the freedom, the 'fine, fresh, careless rapture,' of a mountain park.

Now for a closer description. We confess to have hung off, involuntarily, in despair of giving even a fairly accurate sketch of this adorable creation. What then does it comprise? Nearly all things that man has lacked since the primal fall. A collection of longed-for luxuries, for which the o'ertaxed heart of world-wise, world-wearied man so often sighs in vain. An abode of rest where, from morn till dewy eve, the eye lights on nought but 'things of beauty,' which are 'a joy for ever'; the ear is invaded by no sound but those of Nature's harmonies. Here, if anywhere on earth, may the soul be attuned to heavenly thoughts; here may this fallen nature of ours be purged from all save ennobling ideas, so truly Eden-like are the surroundings. Rare flowering shrubs developed by soil and irrigation into forest trees; masses of choice flowers, exhibiting in this our fiercest summer month a freshness and purity of bloom as astonishing as exquisitely beautiful.

The natural features of the locale have doubtless been exhaustively considered. Yet few horticultural artists would have seized so unerringly upon the difficult compromise between Art and Nature which has here been achieved. The winding walks through the mimic forests are lonely and sequestered as those of an enchanted wood. The sultry heat of the day's last lingering hour is effectually banished. The musical trickle and splash of the tiny waterfalls is in your ear as, book in hand, or lost in the rare luxury of an undisturbed day-dream, you saunter on. Half-hidden recesses appear, where great fronds of foreign ferns show strangely in the 'dim religious light'—'beautiful silence all around, save wood bird to wood bird calling.' Out of the sad, sordid, struggling world, far from its maddening discords and despair-tragedies, your soul seems to recognise a purer, more sublimated mental atmosphere, nearer in every sense to the empyrean, and freed from the lower needs of this house of clay. A half-sigh of regret tells of fair visions fled, even though you emerge on the lower, wider lawns gay with ribbon-