whatever point one views the place he beholds a single satisfactory
picture.

This, I say, is the understanding. I do not say that even among our
prize-winners anybody has yet perfectly attained this, although a few
have come very near it. With these the main surviving drawback is that
the artistic effect is each season so long coming and passes away so
soon--cometh up as a flower and presently has withered.

One of our most gifted literary critics a while ago pointed out the
poetic charm of evanescence; pointed it out more plainly, I fancy, than
it has ever been shown before. But evanescence has this poetic charm
chiefly in nature, almost never in art. The transitoriness of a sunset
glory, or of human life, is rife with poetic pathos because it is a
transitoriness which _cannot be helped_. Therein lay the charm of that
poetic wonder and marvel of its day (1893) the Columbian Exposition's
"White City"; it was an architectural triumph and glory which we could
not have except on condition that it should vanish with the swiftness of
an aurora. Even so, there would have been little poetry in its
evanescence if, through bad workmanship or any obvious folly, it had
failed to fulfil the transient purpose for which it was erected. The
only poetic evanescence is the evanescence that is inevitable. An
unnecessary evanescence in things we make is bad art. If I remember the
story correctly, it was to a Roman lady that Benvenuto Cellini took the
exquisite waxen model of some piece of goldsmithing she had commissioned
him to execute for her. So delighted was she with this mere model that
she longed to keep it and called it the perfection of art, or some such
word. But Benvenuto said, No, he could not claim for it the high name of
art until he should have reproduced it in gold, that being the most
worthy material in which it would endure the use for which it was
designed.

Unless the great Italian was in error, then, a garden ought not to be so
largely made up of plants which perish with the summer as to be, at
their death, no longer a garden. Said that harsh-spoken judge whom we
have already once or twice quoted--that shepherd's-dog of a judge--at
one of the annual bestowals of our Carnegie garden prizes:

"Almost any planting about the base of a building, fence or wall is
better than none; but for this purpose shrubs are far better than annual
flowers. Annuals do not sufficiently mask the hard, offensive
right-angles of the st