less numerous
oil-pictures) of the Somersetshire garden, where that peculiarly English
look of the open-air room is produced by the stretched carpet of the
turf and the firm cushions of the hedges, and a pair of proprietors,
perhaps happier than they know, are putting in an afternoon among their
tulips, under the flushed apple-trees whose stems are so thin and whose
brims so heavy. Are the absorbed couple, at any rate, aware of the
surprising degree to which the clustered ruddy roofs of the next small
town, over the hedge, off at the left, may remind the fanciful
spectator of the way he has seen little dim Italian cities look on their
hill-tops? The whole thing, in this subject, has the particular English
note to which Mr. Parsons repeatedly testifies, the nook quality, the
air of a land and a life so infinitely subdivided that they produce
a thousand pleasant privacies. The painter moves with the months and
finds, after the earliest things, the great bed of pansies in the angle
of the old garden at Sutton, in which, for felicity of position and
perfect pictorial service rendered--to say nothing of its polygonal,
pyramidal roof--the ancient tool-house, or tea-house, is especially to
be commended. Very far descended is such a corner as this, very full of
reference to vanished combinations and uses; and the artist communicates
to us a feeling for it that makes us wish disinterstedly it may be still
as long preserved.

He finds in June, at Blackdown, the blaze of the yellow azalea-bush, or
in another spot the strong pink of the rhododendron, beneath the silver
firs that deepen the blue of the sky. He finds the Vicarage Walk, at
King's Langley, a smother of old-fashioned flowers--a midsummer vista
for the figures of a happy lady and a lucky dog. He finds the delicious
huddle of the gabled, pigeon-haunted roof of a certain brown old
building at Frame, with poppies and gladiolus and hollyhock crowding the
beautiful foreground. He finds--apparently in the same place--the tangle
of the hardy flowers that come while the roses are still in bloom, with
the tall blue larkspurs standing high among them. He finds the lilies,
white and red, at Broadway, and the poppies, which have dropped most of
their petals--apparently to let the roses, which are just coming out,
give _their_ grand party. Their humility is rewarded by the artist's
admirable touch in the little bare poppy-heads that nod on their
flexible pins.

But I cannot go on