Rustic chairs and benches are scattered
about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of the stumps of
obtruncated trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining
branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron. In a
central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens
practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by
the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young
man's heart. There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an
artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both
lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement in
the water are most beautiful and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and
decrepit, when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk
upon dry land. In the latter case, they look like a breed of uncommonly
ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the
moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person
or thing, unless we behold it in the sphere and circumstances to which
it is specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a
labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks,
involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably
within a circuit of only a few yards,--a sad emblem, it seemed to me, of
the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty
in scope, yet large enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with
a weary movement, but no genuine progress.
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