JANUARY. 53 



Thee, native soil ! these happy walks and shades, 

 Fit haunt of Gods ? 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 ? 



But Milton, as in other respects, so he is unrivalled 

 in his painting of garden scenery. One cannot but 

 remark, how in that, as in every thing else, he out- 

 went his own times. In those days of tortured trees, 

 and stiff formal fences and garden-plots, what a 

 magnificent but free, and naturally beautiful wilder- 

 ness he has sketched in the 4th Book of Paradise 

 Lost ! From him, and Lord Bacon, whose taste, 

 however, was far inferior, we may date the regene- 

 ration of English pleasure-gardens ; and now such 

 delightful spots have we scattered through the coun- 

 try, that the East from which we borrowed them 

 can scarcely rival them. The imaginative mind 

 cannot contemplate the assemblage, which, from all 

 far-off lands, is there brought together, without 

 being carried by them into their own fair regions ; 

 nor the reflective one, without being struck with the 

 innumerable benefits we have derived from art and 

 commerce. 



But what crowns all these advantages is, that, 

 though our towns shut us out from the country, by 

 our gardens we can bring the country, in some de- 

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