10 



cities, commonly solace themselves by hoping, with 

 the poet Cowley, " one day to retire to a small house 

 and a large garden." The care of a garden is a 

 somce of agreeable domestic recreation, especially to 

 the female sex, whose sensibilities are keenly alive 

 to the placid beauty of the objects it presents to the 

 eye ; and the air of retirement, tranquility and re- 

 pose which settles on such a scene, is favorable to 

 contemplations full of tenderness and hope. " Our 

 first most endearing and sacred associations," Mrs. 

 Hoffland observes, " are connected with gardens ; 

 our most simple and most refined perceptions of beau- 

 ty are combined with them, and the very condition 

 of our being compels us to the cares, and rewards us 

 with the pleasures attached to them." 



To the valetudinarian the garden is a source of 

 health, and to the aged a source of interest ; for it 

 has been remarked of a taste for gardening, that, un- 

 like other tastes, it remains with us to the very close 

 of life. Where this has been duly nurtured and suf- 

 fered to produce its best effects, the grace of a re- 

 fined and practical wisdom will prove an ample re- 

 compense for the loss of the livelier energies of 

 youth ; and one glimpse of nature will repay the mind 

 for the failure of its early visions, and the destruc- 

 tion of the airy architecture of romance. What a re- 

 deeming, and, at the same time, beautiful touch of 

 natural feeling may be discerned in Mistress Quick- 

 ly's description of the death of the inimitable philos- 

 opher, Falstaff — whom, when all the glories of un- 

 equalled wit, and the raptures of a riotous sensual- 



