A thing meant for adornment, we tell them, must so
truly and sufficiently adorn as to be worth all the room and attention
it takes up. Thou shalt not let anything in thy garden take away thy
guest's attention without repaying him for it; it is stealing.
A lady, not in our competition but one of its most valued patronesses,
lately proposed to herself to place in the centre of a wide, oval lawn a
sun-dial and to have four paths cross the grass and meet there. But on
reflection the query came to her--
"In my unformal garden of simplest grove and sward will a
sun-dial--posing in an office it never performed there, and will never
again be needed for anywhere--a cabinet relic now--will a _posed_
sun-dial be interesting enough when it is arrived at to justify a
special journey and four kept-up paths which cut my beautiful grass-plot
into quarters?"
With that she changed her mind--a thing the good gardener must often
do--and appointed the dial to a place where one comes upon it quite
incidentally while moving from one main feature of the grounds to
another. It is now a pleasing, mild surprise instead of a tame
fulfilment of a showy promise; pleasing, after all, it must, however, be
admitted, to the toy-loving spirit, since the sun-dial has long been,
and henceforth ever will be, an utterly useless thing in a garden, only
true to art when it stands in an old garden, a genuine historical
survival of its day of true utility.
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