THE POETRY OF GARDENING. 107 



there that God walked and communed with his creatures. 

 It was to a garden that in his agony our Lord retired. 

 The very word Paradise is only another name for bliss ; 

 and it may be doubted whether it gains this signification 

 so much from our first parents dwelling there before sin 

 and sorrow were known, as from the natural feelings of 

 all nations and creeds to connect the happiness of a future 

 state inseparably with that of a boundless expanse of trees, 

 and fruits, and flowers. The shade of Achilles is described 

 by Homer as retiring over a mead of asphodels 



" KO.T ct<r</)o5eAoj/ Acijuwi/o ; " 



and Virgil knew how to contrast the adamantine walls and 

 iron-bound towers of the guilty, with th,e flowery lawns of 



the blessed : 



" amoena vireta 

 Fortunatorum nemorum ;" 



and Addison, in his Vision of Mirza, had no better way of 

 describing the seats of bliss than as " islets floating in a 

 sunny sea, covered with fruits and flowers." 



What indeed were the Elysian fields, and the Happy 

 isles, and the gardens of the Hesperides, but so many in- 

 corporations of the highest and loftiest flights of man's 

 imaginations and desires, the realizations of the intensest 

 yearnings of the soul after a higher and more glorious state 

 of existence, and which always made a garden the scene 

 of that better and more abiding happiness ? 



Of all the secondary occupations and pursuits of this 

 life, the Garden is the only one we can hope to follow out 

 in the world which is to come. Simple and pure as any 

 other of our enjoyments may be, the best of them are too 

 artificial and too gross to give us the least hope of our ever 

 meeting them again. Even our books, which we have, 

 loved as friends which we have pored over through the 



