many glories of Nature are to be witnessed; her sweetest odours are poured out; her most impressive and 
balmy quiet is sent upon earth. There, fearless of any “ pestilence that walks in darkness/ 5 the gentlest 
and most timid creature may tread the smooth path of the garden, and behold all the calm pageantry of 
the glittering host of stars, of moonlight and of clouds. The bowers of a good modern garden invite us from 
the fierce heat of noon to the most delicious of oratories, in dry summer eves, to the most charming place 
of social enjoyment. A garden, with all its . accompaniments of bowers, secluded seats, shrubberies, and 
hidden walks, is a concentration of a thousand pleasant objects, and the field of a multitude of animating 
pursuits. The rarest beauties of the vegetable world are not only there congregated, heightened in the rich- 
ness and splendour of their charms, but there many of them are actually created. 
The feeble invalid and feebler age, they who cannot lay hold on Nature in her amplitude, though they 
may anxiously and intensely thirst to renew on heath and mountain, the enchantments of past days, can 
there grasp a multitude of her delights at once. The sedentary man. 
Secluded but not buried, and with song 
Cheering his days, 
there finds the most congenial relaxation, the most restorative exercise ever at hand. The lover of all 
bright hues and graceful forms, of all delicate and spicy aromas of curious processes and wonderful pheno- 
mena, of all that is soothing to the mind, and pleasant to the vision and the taste, there walks in a fairy- 
land of his own creation. There the sun shines tempered by the coolness of whispering branches ; the 
breeze blows softly, charged with fragrance; the dews fall to refresh and awaken sleeping odours, and birds 
bring from their wilder haunts their melodies. To the fair creature, who, like Eve, is a lover of flowers, 
what a perpetual source of affectionate interest, of hopes and fears, and speculations of delightful labours, 
cares and watchings, is found in a garden ! Poets have always delighted to describe their favourite heroines 
amid the amenities of gardens, as places peculiarly accordant with the grace and gentle nature of woman. 
How beautiful is that passing view which Chaucer gives us of Emilia, in Palemon and Arcite ! 
Emily ere day 
Arose and dress’d herself in rich array ; 
Fresh as the month, and as the morning fair, 
Adown her shoulders fell her length of hair ; 
A riband did the braided tresses bind, 
The rest was loose and wanton’d in the wind. 
Aurora had but newly chased the night, 
And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light, 
When to the garden walk she took her way, 
To sport and trip along in cool of day, 
And offer maiden vows in honour of the May. 
At every turn she made a little stand, 
And thrust among the thorns her lily hand 
To draw' the rose ; and every rose she drew, 
She shook its stalk, and brush’d away the dew; 
Then party-colour flowers of white and red 
She wove, to make a garland for her head : 
This done, she sung and caroll’d out so clear, 
Then men and angels might rejoice to hear. 
But how much more beautiful is Milton’s picture of our first mother, pursuing her pleasant labours in the 
first garden, issuing from her bower at Adam’s call, — 
Awake ! the morning shines, and the fresh field 1 What drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed; ' 
Calls us ; we lose the prime to mark how spring How Nature paints her colours, how the bee 
Our tender plants, how blows the citron grove, | Sits on the bloom, extracting liquid sweet : 
or to her sylvan home, as we see her 
Just then return'd 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? thus leave 
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 climates 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 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, however, was far in- 
ferior, we may date the regeneration of English pleasure-gardens; and now such delightful spots have we 
scattered through the country, 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 to- 
gether 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. 
