ThursdaySep 18, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
To these delights of a garden, age may add a further interest which can hardly be distinguished from beauty, for the mind, at least with those who have the historic instinct, is always longing to be connected with the past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age, in long-settled peace beyond the turn of Fortune's wheel, the 'scornful dominion of accident.' Restfulness is the prevailing note of an old garden; in this fairy world of echo and suggestion where the Present Age never comes but to commune with the Past, we feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure which has grown and blossomed as the rose.
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind.
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