Eden was, clearly, an "English" garden. This paradise was a natural garden of all manner of beautiful plants, a garden whose charm can only have depended on those plants, on the lie of the land, and the disposition of pleasant waters. Whoever conceived the myth conceived an ideal, something which nature unaided does not accomplish but which man perceives to be possible. God had scattered his best work about the world; he made a good effect here, contrived a lovely view there, so disposed land, waterand trees in some corners that the mysterious demands of the aesthetic sense were satisfied; but what God had not done was to combine deliberately in a single masterwork all the triumphs of form and colour of which his art was capable.
展开▼
