natural in feeling: it never will harmonise with anything, and, if people will have it, should be kept out of sight until they get into it. But, in laying out the garden which is to assist the effect of the building, we must observe, and exclusively use, the natural combination of flowers.[1] Now, as far as we are aware, bluish purple is the only flower colour which nature ever uses in masses of distant effect; this, however, she does in the case of most heathers, with the Rhododéndron ferrugineum, and, less extensively, with the colder colour of the wood hyacinth.
- ↑ Every one who is about to lay out a limited extent of garden, in which he wishes to introduce many flowers, should read and attentively study, first Shelley, and next Shakspeare. The latter, indeed, induces the most beautiful connexions between thought and flower that can be found in the whole range of European literature; but he very often uses the symbolical effect of the flower, which it can only have on the educated mind, instead of the natural and true effect of the flower, which it must have, more or less, upon every mind. Thus, when Ophelia, presenting her wild flowers, says: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts:" the infinite beauty of the passage depends upon the arbitrary meaning attached to the flowers. But, when Shelley speaks of
"The lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair, and passion so pale,
That the light of her tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilion of tender green,"
he is etherealising an impression which the mind naturally receives from the flower. Consequently, as it is only by their natural influence that flowers can address the mind through the eye, we must read Shelley, to learn how to use flowers, and Shakspeare, to learn to love them. In both writers we find the wild flower possessing soul as well as life, and mingling its influence most intimately, like an untaught melody, with the deepest and most secret streams of human emotion.
