THE HISTORY OF GARDENING. 57 



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 

 Flow'rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice art 

 In beds and curious knots but nature boon 

 Pour'd forth on hill, and dale, and plain, 

 Both where the morning sun first warmly smote 

 The open field, and where the unpierc'd shad 

 Imbrown'd the noon-tide bow'rs. Thus was this place 

 A happy rural seat of various view. 



• 

 Read this transporting description, paint to your mind the scenes 



that follow, contrast them with the savage but respectable terror with 



which the poet guards the bounds of his Paradise, fenced 



With the champaign head 

 Of a deep wilderness, whose hairy sides 

 With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, 

 Access denied ; and overhead upgrew 

 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 ; — 



And then recollect that the author of this sublime vision had never 

 seen a glimpse of anything like what he has imagined, that his 

 favourite ancients had dropped not a hint of such divine scenery, and 

 that the conceits in Italian gardens, and Theobalds and Nonsuch, 

 were the brightest originals that his memory could furnish. His 

 intellectual eye saw a nobler plan, so little did he suffer by the loss 

 of sight. It sufficed him to have seen the materials with which he 

 could work. The vigour of a boundless imagination told him how a 

 plan might be disposed, that would embellish nature, and restore art 

 to its proper office, the just improvement or imitation of it. 



It is necessary that the concurrent testimony of that age should 

 swear to posterity that the description above quoted was written 

 above half a century before the introduction of modern gardening, or 

 our incredulous descendants will defraud the poet of half his glory, 

 by being persuaded that he copied some garden or gardens he had 

 ?een — so minutely do his ideas correspond with the present standard. 

 But what shall we say for that intervening half century who could 

 read that plan, and never attempt to put it in execution ? 



Now let us turn to an admired writer, posterior to Milton, and sec 



