If, therefore, illustration is to be an attempt to say over again what the poet has already said perfectly, it is certain to prove itself superfluous, and to be nothing better than a labour of tautology. But there is a quality in all fine work which gives invitation into the charmed circle of its influence to whatever is freshly and sympathetically touched with the ideas it conveys. Great work tells so differently on different minds; not by contrary but by kindred ways it speaks freshly perhaps to each individual. Thus, to express accurately in another medium an appreciation, an individual sense of delight or emotion in work of finished and constructive beauty is the only way of illustration which seems to me profitable. The appreciation may be faulty; but in so far as it states a personal view of its subject, it has legitimate standing ground. I have endeavoured to make evident in my drawings the particular way in which this poem has appealed to me. The garden, fine and elaborate, full of artifice, opposing with an infinity of delicate labour the random overgrowth of the wilderness which seeks jealously to encroach on it, has perhaps this to hint concerning all forms of beauty of man’s devising,—that, in spite of the pains entailed in their cultivation, the fragile and conditional state of their constitution remains: over all such things at last comes the tread of Pan, effacing, and replacing with his own image and superscription, the parenthetic grace—so spiritual almost in some of its suggestions—of the garden deity. The lady of the garden, the charming sentimentalist, whom I can only excuse for not killing the slugs and snails by believing that she wore a crinoline and was altogether ignorant of natural laws, harmonises exquisitely for a while with her high-clipped hedges and garden statuary. It is an _ensemble_ to gaze into as into a picture: but the shadows of ruin and decay cross it; it is too graceful to last. Pan is stronger than any form of beauty that springs out of modes and fashions. So, when she dies, she is but the forerunner of the death of the whole garden: when she evaporates the _petite mort_ runs through all its bowers and alleys: its apparitions rise and follow her funeral with a sense that their own time of dissolution approaches; and the mode passes through a period of squalor and morbid abandonment back into the hands of the ultimate master of things earthly. It is an unpopular thing, may be, to assert that man’s sense of beauty is so conditional to himself and the uses he makes of it. Yet here we are shown how, with war to the death, unsightly overthrow follows his abandonment of his stolen pleasure-ground, and wipes out his trespassing footprints.