Chapter 172

AND OTHER STORIES 159 than anything else. It was grass, clearly, but grass such as we seldom see out of England, so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-rut, not even a chip or a dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully placed , not thrown, along the sides of the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of half -precise, half -negligent, and wholly picturesque definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere luxuriantly in the interspaces. What to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was art undoubtedly — that did not surprise me ; all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say there was much to wonder at in the mere excess of art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might have been done here, with such natural “capabilities” (as they have it in the books on Landscape Gardening), with very little labor and expense. No, it was not the amount but the character of the art which caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this fairylike avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I gazed : an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had been taken to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful on the one hand, and the pittoresque, in the true sense of the Italian term, on the other. There were few straight, and no long, uninterrupted lines. The same effect of curvature or of color appeared twice usually, but not oftener, at any one point of view. Everywhere was variety in uniformity. It was a piece of “composition,” in which the most fastidiously critical taste could scarcely have suggested an emendation. I had turned to the right as I entered this road, and now, arising, I continued in the same direction. The path