Then he drew a small blue volume out of his pocket, and lay down on the grass with his back against the trunk of an apple-tree.  Austin’s theory—­or one of his theories, for he had hundreds—­was that one’s literature should always be in harmony with one’s surroundings; and so, intending to pass his morning in the garden, he had chosen ’The Garden of Cyrus’ as an appropriate study.  He opened it reverently, for it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one of the princes of prose.  He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the inscrutable secrets of the quincunx.  His fine ear was charmed by the rhythm of the sumptuous and stately sentences, and his pulses throbbed in response to every measured phrase in which the lore of garden symmetry and the principles of garden science were set forth.  He read of the hanging gardens of Babylon, first made by Queen Semiramis, third or fourth from Nimrod, and magnificently renewed by Nabuchodonosor, according to Josephus:  “from whence, overlooking Babylon, and all the region about it, he found no circumscription to the eye of his ambition; till, over-delighted with the bravery of this Paradise, in his melancholy metamorphosis he found the folly of that delight, and a proper punishment in the contrary habitation—­in wild plantations and wanderings of the fields.”  Austin shook his head over this; he did not think it possible to love a garden too much, and demurred to the idea that such a love deserved any punishment at all.  But that was theology, and he had no taste for theological dissertations.  So he dipped into the pages where the quincunx is “naturally” considered, and here he admired the encyclopaedic learning of the author, which appeared to have been as wide as that attributed to Solomon; then glanced at the “mystic” part, which he reserved for later study.  But one paragraph riveted his attention, as he turned over the leaves.  Here was a mine of gold, a treasure-house of suggestiveness and wisdom.

"Light, that makes things seen, makes some things invisible; were it not for darkness and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the creation had remained unseen, and the stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the horizon with the sun, or there was not an eye to behold them.  The greatest mystery of religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish types, we find the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat.  Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.  All things fall under this name.  The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God."