JANUARY. 29 



How nature paints her colours, how the bee 

 Sits on the bloom, extracting liquid sweet : 



or, to her sylvan home, as we see her 



J ust then returned at shut of evening flowers : 

 or, in the midst of that anguish, when hearing 

 pronounced her banishment from Eden, she 

 exclaimed " with audible lament," 



Oh, unexpected stroke worse than of death ! 

 Must I thus leave thee, Paradise 1 thus leave 

 Thee, native soil ! these happy walks and shades, 

 Fit haunt of Gods f where I had hoped to spend, 

 Quiet, though sad, the respite of that day 

 That must be mortal to us both. O, flowers, 

 That never will in other climate grow, 

 My early visitation and my last 

 At even, which I bred up with tender hand 

 From the first opening bud, and gave ye names ! 

 Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank 

 Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount 1 



But Milton, as in other respects, so he is un- 

 rivalled irt his painting of garden scenery. 

 One cannot but remark, how in that, as in 

 every thing else, he outwent his own times. 

 In those days of tortured trees, and stiff, formal 

 fences and garden-plots, what a magnificent but 

 free, and naturally beautiful wilderness he has 

 sketched in the 4th book of Paradise Lost ! 

 From him, and Lord Bacon, whose taste how- 



