Garden-Craft Old and New

by John Dando Sedding

And the poet Wordsworth, self-drawn in his own works, or depicted by his friends, is one of the old stock of sane, sound-hearted Englishmen, who can be equally susceptible to the inward beauties of man's created brain-world, and the outward beauties of unkempt Nature. So the combination we plead for is not impossible! The two tastes are not irreconcilable! Blessed be both!

We may trust Wordsworth implicitly as an authority upon Nature. No one questions his knowledge of wild woodland lore. There is no one of ancient or of modern times who in his outward mien, his words, his habits, carries more indisputable proof of the prophet's ordination than the man who spent a long noviciate in his native mountain solitudes. There is no one so fully entitled, or so well able to speak of and for her, as he who knows her language to the faintest whisper, who spent his days at her feet, who pored over her lineaments under every change of expression, who in his writings drew upon the secret honey of the beauty and harmony of the world, telling, to use his own swinging phrases, of "the joy and happiness of loving creatures, of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied actions and energies."

Of all Nature's consecrated children, he is the prince of the apostolate; he is, so to speak, the beloved disciple of them all, whose exalted personal love admits him to the right to lean upon her breast, to hear her heart-beats, to catch knowledge there that had been kept secret since the world began. None so familiar with pastoral life in its varied time-fulness, sweet or stern, glad or grim, pathetic or sublime, as he who carries in his mind the echoes of the passion of the storm, the moan of the passing wind with its beat upon the bald mountain-crag, the sighing of the dry sedge, the lunge of mighty waters, the tones of waterfalls, the inland sounds of caves and trees, the plaintive spirit of the solitude. There are none who have pondered so deeply over "the blended holiness of earth and sky," the gesture of the wind and cloud, the silence of the hills; none so free to fraternise with things bold or obscure, great or small, as he who told alike of the love and infinite longings of Margaret, of the fresh joy of

"The blooming girl whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew,"

of the lonely star, the solitary raven, the pliant hare-bell, swinging in the breeze, the meadows and the lower ground, and all the sweetness of a common dawn.

Thus did Wordsworth enter into the soul of things and sing of them

"In a music sweeter than their own."

Nay, says Arnold, "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter of his poem, but wrote his poem for him" ("Essays in Criticism," p. 155).

So much for Wordsworth upon Nature out of doors; now let us hear him upon Art in a garden, of which he was fully entitled to speak, and we shall see that the man is no less the poet of idealism upon his own ground, than the poet of actuality in the woodland world.

Writing to his friend Sir Geo. Beaumont,[49] with all the outspokenness of friendship and the simplicity of a candid mind, he thus delivers himself upon the Art of Gardening: "Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a Liberal Art, in some sort like poetry and painting, and its object is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the control of good sense; that is, those of the best and wisest; but, speaking with more precision, it is to assist Nature in moving the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauties of Nature, who have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, the most independent, the most ennobling with Nature and human life."