The right
profile and surface for a lawn of falling grade, the surface which will
permanently best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a double
curve, an ogee line. For, more or less emphasized, that is Nature's line
in all her affable moods on land or water: a descent or ascent beginning
gradually, increasing rapidly, and concluding gently. We see it in the
face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to
Praxiteles a certain ownership in this double curve. It is a living
line; it suggests Nature conscious and astir as no single curve or
straight line can.
I admit that even among amateurs this is rather small talk, but it
brings me to this point: in the passage of water down a ravine of its
own making, this line of Nature astir may repeat itself again and again
but is commonly too inaffable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. In
that middle part of it where the descent is swift it may be more or less
of a plunge, and after the plunge the water is likely to pause on the
third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming its triple action again.
And so, in my ravine, some seasons later, I ventured to detain the
overflow of my first pool on a second and a third lingering place,
augmenting the water supply by new springs developed in the bottoms of
the new pools. The second pool has a surface of a thousand square feet,
the third spans nineteen hundred, and there are fish in all three,
hatched there--"pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout--among
spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, flags, and dainty water-weeds; and
sometimes at night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock full moon
shines up from it to the stone exedra on the lawn, I seem to have taken
my Praxitelean curves so directly from Nature that she thinks she took
them herself from me and thanks me for the suggestion.
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