It is graceful, and peculiarly appropriate
to those grounds where parents and children are constantly
congregating. The whole is surmounted by a statue of the king, in
white marble--the finest representation of him I have ever seen.
Thoughtful, yet benign, the old king seems like a good father keeping
a grave and affectionate watch over the pleasures of his children in
their garden frolics. There was something about these moss-grown
gardens that seemed so rural and pastoral, that I at once preferred
them to all I had seen in Europe. Choice flowers are planted in knots,
here and there, in sheltered nooks, as if they had grown by accident;
and an air of sweet, natural wildness is left amid the most careful
cultivation. The people seemed to be enjoying themselves less
demonstratively and with less vivacity than in France, but with a calm
inwardness. Each nation has its own way of being happy, and the style
of life in each bears a certain relation of appropriateness to
character. The trim, gay, dressy, animated air of the Tuileries suits
admirably with the mobile, sprightly vivacity of society there. Both,
in their way, are beautiful; but this seems less formal, and more
according to nature.
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