g would tend, in effect, to draw those farther waters in under
the trees and into the picture.

Such relationships are very rewarding to find to whoever would garden
well. Hence this mention. One's garden has to do with whatever is in
sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as feasible and important to
plant in the fair as to plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my
grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ravine where at one or two
places in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily
circuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, there should
be either a bridge or a dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed
pleasanter every way--showed less incongruity and less inutility--than a
bridge with no water under it.

As to "fooling with running water," the mere trickle here in question
had to be dragged out of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained
for me to find out by experience that even that weakling, imprisoned and
grown to a pool, though of only three hundred square feet in surface,
when aided and abetted by New England frosts and exposed on a southern
slope to winter noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as much
trouble--proportionately--as any Hebrew babe drawn from the bulrushes of
the Nile is said to have given his.

Now if there is any value in recording these experiences it can be only
in the art principles they reveal. To me in the present small instance
the principle illustrated was that of the true profile line for ascent
or descent in a garden. You may go into any American town where there
is any inequality of ground and in half an hour find a hundred or two
private lawns graded--from the house to each boundary line--on a single
falling curve, or, in plain English, a hump. The best reason why this
curve is not artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not
natural and gains nothing by being unnatural. All gardening is a certain
conquest of Nature, and even when "formal" should interfere with her own
manner and custom as slightly as is required by the necessities of the
case--the needs of that particular spot's human use and joy. The right
profile and surface for a lawn of falling grade, the surface which will
permanently best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a double
curve, an ogee line. For, more or less emphasized, that is Nature's line
in all her affable moods on land or water: a descent or ascent beginning
gradually, increasing rapidly, and