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"Of the principles which guided the great Renaissance garden-makers it is not so easy to speak, for it was in poetry, in imagination that they reigned supreme, and inspiration is a breath of the muses which may not be brought within the rules of art.

"Their first thought was for the aesthetic impression upon the individual, for sentiment and emotion, for intellectual suggestion, for chords struck upon those vague, nebulous, spectral feelings which are ever trembling upon the threshold of consciousness. To them the garden seemed to be only half the problem, the other half was that blundering ghost-haunted miracle, the human mind.

"Thus they learnt the value of striking contrast; of sudden and thrilling surprise; of close confinement as a prelude to boundless freedom; of scorching sun as a prelude to welcome shade or cooling river; of monotony, even of ugliness, set for a foil to enchanting beauty, as a discord is used in music, as the lowered tone of a landscape brings out the fires of sunset or the primrose light of dawn, as a dwarfish figure on a Greek sarcophagus gives grandeur to a frieze of fighting heroes. Their work, like that of all great artists, is full of mystery, of haunting beauty, of magic which all must feel but few can understand."