is poetry. He closed every vista and emphasized every opening
in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come
object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene: a
rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a
memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44]
Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions
expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from
Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says
that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant
_dead_ trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of
such devices as artificial ruins, "a feigned steeple of a distant church
or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water." Shenstone was
not above these little effects: he constructed a "ruinated priory" and a
temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping
faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes.

Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time. The
motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his
cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon Thyrza":
"Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" The
habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who
composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton.
One of Akenside's best pieces is his "Inscription for a Grotto," which is
not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote
a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in
Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more
celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or
pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than
exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and
hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was
symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that
pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray,
Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the
world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through
the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the
drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot.

At Hagle