“…all pure art is praise…” John Ruskin

"We express our delight in a beautiful or lovely thing no less by lament for its loss, than gladness in its presence;

Much art is therefore tragic or pensive, but all pure art is praise…Fix then, this in your mind…your art is to be praise of something that you love." 

John Ruskin, "The Laws of Fesole"

Victorian rhetoric, the art of the prose poem, the fusion in mind and emotion of contemplative insight and apt, indeed artistic expression – Ruskin is one of the great masters of English descriptive writing. I suspect the quality of the writing is directly indexed to his quality of seeing, and responding to what he saw. Thinking about the nature of the contemplative disposition, I recognise the lure of the beautiful, the frisson of pleasure in the encounter with that which awakens longing.

The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botaninc gardens, and is a case in point