Under their colours stand display’d”:
which suggests the careful horrors of bedding-out. A certain negligence is imperative; we may be studious as regards effect, but we must not show it. The question of colour-grouping is certainly one worthy of careful consideration; for if gardening is not exactly an art that “doth mend Nature,” it is, at all events, a selective art, picking and choosing of Nature’s best and bringing this together within special confines, there to show in a series of close-knit tableaux that which wild Nature spreads out far and wide among much that, æsthetically, is of secondary “happiness.”
L’ENVOI
“But none has hope like thine!
Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,
Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,
Nursing thy project in unclouded joy,
And every doubt long blown by time away.”