into some trim and quiet garden. "I never," he says, "had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and the study of nature." The late Miss Mitford, whose writings breathe so freshly of the nature that she loved so dearly, realized for herself a similar desire. It is said that she had the cottage of a peasant with the garden of a Duchess. Cowley is not contented with expressing in plain prose his appreciation of garden enjoyments. He repeatedly alludes to them in verse.

Thus, thus (and this deserved great Virgil's praise)

The old Corycian yeoman passed his days;

Thus his wise life Abdolonymus spent ;

Th' ambassadors, which the great emperor sent

To offer him a crown, with wonder found
The reverend gardener, hoeing of his ground;
Unwillingly and slow and discontent

From his loved cottage to a throne he went;
And oft he stopped, on his triumphant way:
And oft looked back and oft was heard to say
Not without sighs, Alas! I there forsake
A happier kingdom than I go to take.

Lib. IV. Plantarum.

Here is a similar allusion by the same poet to the delights which great men amongst the ancients have taken in a rural retirement.

Methinks, I see great Dioclesian walk

In the Salonian garden's noble shade

Which by his own imperial hands was made.

I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain

To entice him to a throne again.

"If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
"Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,

Than 'tis that you should carry me away:

And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,

Than ever, after the most happy sight

In triumph to the Capitol I rode,

To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god."

The Garden.

Cowley does not omit the important moral which a garden furnishes.

Where does the wisdom and the power divine

In a more bright and sweet reflection shine?
Where do we finer strokes and colors see

Of the Creator's real poetry,

Than when we with attention look

Upon the third day's volume of the book?

If we could open and intend our eye
We all, like Moses, might espy,

E'en in a bush, the radiant Deity.

In Leigh Hunt's charming book entitled The Town, I find the following notice of the partiality of poets for houses with gardens attached to them:

"It is not surprizing that garden-houses as they were called, should have formerly abounded in Holborn, in Bunhill Row, and other (at that time) suburban places. We notice the fact, in order to observe how fond the poets were of occupying houses of this description. Milton seems to have made a point of having one. The only London residence of Chapman which is known, was in Old Street Road; doubtless at that time a rural suburb. Beaumont and Fletcher's house, on the Surrey side of the Thames, (for they lived as well as wrote together,) most probably had a garden and Dryden's house in Gerard Street looked into the garden of the mansion built by the Earls of Leicester. A tree, or even a flower, put in a window in the streets of a great city, (and the London citizens, to their credit, are fond of flowers,) affects the eye something in the same way as the hand-organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear. They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are associated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent.”

:

Milton must have been a passionate lover of flowers and flower-gardens or he could never have exhibited the exquisite. taste and genial feeling which characterize all the floral allusions and descriptions with which so much of his poetry is embellished. He lived for some time in a house in Westminster over-looking the Park. The same house was tenanted by Jeremy Bentham for forty years. It would be difficult to meet with any two individuals of more opposite temperaments than the author of Paradise Lost and the Utilitarian Philosopher. There

is or was a stone in the wall at the end of the garden inscribed TO THE PRINCE OF POETS. Two beautiful cotton trees overarched the inscription, "and to show" says Hazlitt, (who subsequently lived in the same house himself,) "how little the refinements of taste or fancy entered Bentham's system, he proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden, where he had breathed an air of truth and heaven for near half a century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs !"

No poet, ancient or modern, has described a garden on a large scale in so noble a style as Milton. He has anticipated the finest conceptions of the latest landscape-gardeners, and infinitely surpassed all the accounts we have met with of the gardens of the olden time before us. His Paradise is a

Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned

Or of revived Adonis or renowned

Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son,

Or that, not mystic, where the sapient King
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.*

The description is too long to quote entire, but I must make room for a delightful extract. Familiar as it must be to all lovers of poetry, who will object to read it again and again? Genuine poetry is like a masterpiece of the painter's art-we can gaze with admiration for the hundredth time on a noble picture. The mind and the eye are never satiated with the truly beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

* Revived Adonis,-for, according to tradition he died every year and revived again. Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son;—that is, of Ulysses, whom he entertained on his return from Troy. Or that, not mystic-not fabulous as the rest, but a real garden whicn Solomon made for his wife, the daughter of Pharoah, king of Egypt.-WARBURTON.

"Divested of harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry," observes Horace Walpole, "the garden of Alcinous was a small orchard and vineyard with some beds of herbs and two fountains that watered them, inclosed within a quickset hedge." Lord Kames, says, still more boldly, that it was nothing but a kitchen garden. Certainly, gardening amongst the ancient Greeks, was a very simple business. It is only within the present century that it has been any where elevated into a fine art,

So on he fares, and to the border comes
Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied: and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene; and as, the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops,
The verdurous wall of Paradise up-sprung:
Which to our general sire gave prospect large
Into his nether empire neighbouring round;
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once, of golden hue,
Appear'd, with gay enamell'd colours mix'd;
On which the sun more glad impress'd his beams,

Than on fair evening cloud, or humid bow.

When God hath shower'd the earth; so lovely seem'd

That landscape: and of pure now purer air

Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires

Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair: now gentle gales,
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail

* "We are unwilling to diminish or lose the credit of Paradise, or only pass it over with [the Hebrew word for] Eden, though the Greek be of a later name. In this excepted, we know not whether the ancient gardens do equal those of late times, or those at present in Europe. Of the gardens of Hesperides, we know nothing singular, but some golden apples. Of Alcinous his garden, we read nothing beyond figs, apples, olives; if we allow it to be any more than a fiction of Homer, unhappily placed in Corfu, where the sterility of the soil makes men believe there was no such thing at all. The gardens of Adonis were so empty that they afforded proverbial expression, and the principal part thereof was empty spaces, with herbs and flowers in pots. I think we little understand the pensile gardens of Semiramis, which made one of the wonders of it [Babylon], wherein probably the structure exceeded the plants contained in them. The excellency thereof was probably in the trees, and if the descension of the roots be equal to the height of trees, it was not [absurd] of Strebæus to think the pillars were hollow that the roots might shoot into them."-Sir Thomas Browne.--Bohn's Edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Works, vol. 2, page 498.

Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore

Of Araby the Blest; with such delay

Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.

Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulf'd; for God had thrown
That mountain as his garden mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears;
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country, whereof here needs no account;
But rather to tell how, if art could tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrown'd the noontide bowers; thus was this place
A happy rural seat of various view;

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnish'd with golden rind,

Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,

If true, here only, and of delicious taste:

Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed;

Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap

Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crown'd
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,