'
'The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as the
only somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow.'
'Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to the
charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its
villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet
harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain-
streams. Those grounds of Sir William H---'s are a double paradise,
the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of
the Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle
and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of
piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-
fringed waterfalls, into "trim walks, and fragrant alleys green; and
the door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond to
the Alps. Happy he who "possesses," as the world calls it, and
happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.'
So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations
always flowed with such a graceful ease,--a simple, smiling
earnestness,--an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have
been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthy
enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist.
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