Flowers and Flower-Gardens
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Title: Flowers and Flower-Gardens
Author: David Lester Richardson
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12286]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLOWERS AND FLOWER-GARDENS ***
Produced by Tony Browne and PG Distributed Proofreaders. Produced
from images provided by the Million Book Project.
FLOWERS AND FLOWER-GARDENS.
BY
DAVID LESTER RICHARDSON,
PRINCIPAL OF THE HINDU METROPOLITAN COLLEGE, AND AUTHOR OF "LITERARY
LEAVES," "LITERARY RECREATIONS," &C.
WITH AN APPENDIX OF
PRACTICAL INSTRUCTIONS AND USEFUL INFORMATION RESPECTING THE
ANGLO-INDIAN FLOWER-GARDEN.
CALCUTTA:
MDCCCLV.
PREFACE.
In every work regard the writer's end,
Since none can compass more than they intend.
_Pope_.
This volume is far indeed from being a scientific treatise _On Flowers
and Flower-Gardens_:--it is mere gossip in print upon a pleasant
subject. But I hope it will not be altogether useless. If I succeed in
my object I shall consider that I have gossipped to some purpose. On
several points--such as that of the mythology and language of flowers--I
have said a good deal more than I should have done had I been writing
for a different community. I beg the London critics to bear this in
mind. I wished to make the subject as attractive as possible to some
classes of people here who might not have been disposed to pay any
attention to it whatever if I had not studied their amusement as much as
their instruction. I have tried to sweeten the edge of the cup.
I did not at first intend the book to exceed fifty pages: but I was
almost insensibly carried on further and further from the proposed limit
by the attractive nature of the materials that pressed upon my notice.
As by far the largest portion, of it has been written hurriedly, amidst
other avocations, and bit by bit; just as the Press demanded an
additional supply of "_copy_," I have but too much reason to apprehend
that it will seem to many of my readers, fragmentary and ill-connected.
Then again, in a city like Calcutta, it is not easy to prepare any thing
satisfactorily that demands much literary or scientific research. There
are very many volumes in all the London Catalogues, but not immediately
obtainable in Calcutta, that I should have been most eager to refer to
for interesting and valuable information, if they had been at hand. The
mere titles of these books have often tantalized me with visions of
riches beyond my reach. I might indeed have sent for some of these from
England, but I had announced this volume, and commenced the printing of
it, before it occurred to me that it would be advisable to extend the
matter beyond the limits I had originally contemplated. I must now send
it forth, "with all its imperfections on its head;" but not without the
hope that in spite of these, it will be found calculated to increase the
taste amongst my brother exiles here for flowers and flower-gardens, and
lead many of my Native friends--(particularly those who have been
educated at the Government Colleges,--who have imbibed some English
thoughts and feelings--and who are so fortunate as to be in possession
of landed property)--to improve their parterres,--and set an example to
their poorer countrymen of that neatness and care and cleanliness and
order which may make even the peasant's cottage and the smallest plot of
ground assume an aspect of comfort, and afford a favorable indication of
the character of the possessor.
D.L.R.
_Calcutta, September 21st_ 1855.
ERRATA.
A friend tells me that the allusion to the Acanthus on the first page of
this book is obscurely expressed, that it was not the _root_ but the
_leaves_ of the plant that suggested the idea of the Corinthian capital.
The root of the Acanthus produced the leaves which overhanging the sides
of the basket struck the fancy of the Architect. This was, indeed, what
I _meant_ to say, and though I have not very lucidly expressed myself, I
still think that some readers might have understood me rightly even
without the aid of this explanation, which, however, it is as well for
me to give, as I wish to be intelligible to _all_. A writer should
endeavor to make it impossible for any one to misapprehend his meaning,
though there are some writers of high name both in England and America
who seem to delight in puzzling their readers.
At the bottom of page 200, allusion is made to the dotted lines at some
of the open turns in the engraved labyrinth. By some accident or mistake
the dots have been omitted, but any one can understand where the stop
hedges which the dotted lines indicated might be placed so as to give
the wanderer in the maze, additional trouble to find his way out of it.
[Illustration of a garden.]
ON FLOWERS AND FLOWER-GARDENS,
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is
come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
_The Song of Solomon_.
* * * * *
These are thy glorious works, Parent of good!
Almighty, Thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then!
_Milton_.
* * * * *
Soft roll your incense, herbs and fruits and flowers,
In mingled clouds to HIM whose sun exalts
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints.
_Thomson_.
A taste for floriculture is spreading amongst Anglo-Indians. It is a
good sign. It would be gratifying to learn that the same refining taste
had reached the Natives also--even the lower classes of them. It is a
cheap enjoyment. A mere palm of ground may be glorified by a few radiant
blossoms. A single clay jar of the rudest form may be so enriched and
beautified with leaves and blossoms as to fascinate the eye of taste. An
old basket, with a broken tile at the top of it, and the root of the
acanthus within, produced an effect which seemed to Calimachus, the
architect, "the work of the Graces." It suggested the idea of the
capital of the Corinthian column, the most elegant architectural
ornament that Art has yet conceived.
Flowers are the poor man's luxury; a refinement for the uneducated. It
has been prettily said that the melody of birds is the poor man's music,
and that flowers are the poor man's poetry. They are "a discipline of
humanity," and may sometimes ameliorate even a coarse and vulgar nature,
just as the cherub faces of innocent and happy children are sometimes
found to soften and purify the corrupted heart. It would be a delightful
thing to see the swarthy cottagers of India throwing a cheerful grace on
their humble sheds and small plots of ground with those natural
embellishments which no productions of human skill can rival.
The peasant who is fond of flowers--if he begin with but a dozen little
pots of geraniums and double daisies upon his window sills, or with a
honeysuckle over his humble porch--gradually acquires a habit, not only
of decorating the outside of his dwelling and of cultivating with care
his small plot of ground, but of setting his house in order within, and
making every thing around him agreeable to the eye. A love of
cleanliness and neatness and simple ornament is a moral feeling. The
country laborer, or the industrious mechanic, who has a little garden to
be proud of, the work of his own hand, becomes attached to his place of
residence, and is perhaps not only a better subject on that account, but
a better neighbour--a better man. A taste for flowers is, at all events,
infinitely preferable to a taste for the excitements of the pot-house or
the tavern or the turf or the gaming table, or even the festal board,
especially for people of feeble health--and above all, for the poor--who
should endeavor to satisfy themselves with inexpensive pleasures.[001]
In all countries, civilized or savage, and on all occasions, whether of
grief or rejoicing, a natural fondness for flowers has been exhibited,
with more or less tenderness or enthusiasm. They beautify religious
rites. They are national emblems: they find a place in the blazonry of
heraldic devices. They are the gifts and the language of friendship and
of love.
Flowers gleam in original hues from graceful vases in almost every
domicile where Taste presides; and the hand of "nice Art" charms us with
"counterfeit presentments" of their forms and colors, not only on the
living canvas, but even on our domestic China-ware, and our mahogany
furniture, and our wall-papers and hangings and carpets, and on our
richest apparel for holiday occasions and our simplest garments for
daily wear. Even human Beauty, the Queen of all loveliness on earth,
engages Flora as her handmaid at the toilet, in spite of the dictum of
the poet of 'The Seasons,' that "Beauty when unadorned is adorned the
most."
Flowers are hung in graceful festoons both in churches and in ball-rooms.
They decorate the altar, the bride-bed, the cradle, and the bier.
They grace festivals, and triumphs, and processions; and cast a glory on
gala days; and are amongst the last sad honors we pay to the objects of
our love.
I remember the death of a sweet little English girl of but a year old,
over whom, in her small coffin, a young and lovely mother sprinkled the
freshest and fairest flowers. The task seemed to soften--perhaps to
sweeten--her maternal grief. I shall never forget the sight. The
bright-hued blossoms seemed to make her oblivious for a moment of the
darkness and corruption to which she was so soon to consign her priceless
treasure. The child's sweet face, even in death, reminded me that the
flowers of the field and garden, however lovely, are all outshone by
human beauty. What floral glory of the wild-wood, or what queen of the
parterre, in all the pride of bloom, laughing in the sun-light or
dancing in the breeze, hath a charm that could vie for a single moment
with the soft and holy lustre of that motionless and faded human lily? I
never more deeply felt the force of Milton's noble phrase "_the human
face divine_" than when gazing on that sleeping child. The fixed placid
smile, the smoothly closed eye with its transparent lid, the air of
profound tranquillity, the simple purity (elevated into an aspect of
bright intelligence, as if the little cherub already experienced the
beatitude of another and a better world,) were perfectly angelic--and
mocked all attempt at description. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven!"
O flower of an earthly spring! destined to blossom in the eternal
summer of another and more genial region! Loveliest of lovely
children--loveliest to the last! More beautiful in death than aught
still living! Thou seemest now to all who miss and mourn thee but a sweet
name--a fair vision--a precious memory;--but in reality thou art a more
truly living thing than thou wert before or than aught thou hast left
behind. Thou hast come early into a rich inheritance. Thou hast now a
substantial existence, a genuine glory, an everlasting possession, beyond
the sky. Thou hast exchanged the frail flowers that decked thy bier for
amaranthine hues and fragrance, and the brief and uncertain delights of
mortal being for the eternal and perfect felicity of angels!
I never behold elsewhere any of the specimens of the several varieties
of flowers which the afflicted parent consigned to the hallowed little
coffin without recalling to memory the sainted child taking her last
rest on earth. The mother was a woman of taste and sensibility, of high
mind and gentle heart, with the liveliest sense of the loveliness of all
lovely things; and it is hardly necessary to remind the reader how much
refinement such as hers may sometimes alleviate the severity of sorrow.
Byron tells us that the stars are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves _a star_.
But might we not with equal justice say that every thing excellent and
beautiful and precious has named itself _a flower_?
If stars teach as well as shine--so do flowers. In "still small accents"
they charm "the nice and delicate ear of thought" and sweetly whisper
that "the hand that made them is divine."
The stars are the poetry of heaven--the clouds are the poetry of the
middle sky--the flowers are the poetry of the earth. The last is the
loveliest to the eye and the nearest to the heart. It is incomparably
the sweetest external poetry that Nature provides for man. Its
attractions are the most popular; its language is the most intelligible.
It is of all others the best adapted to every variety and degree of
mind. It is the most endearing, the most familiar, the most homefelt,
and congenial. The stars are for the meditation of poets and
philosophers; but flowers are not exclusively for the gifted or the
scientific; they are the property of all. They address themselves to our
common nature. They are equally the delight of the innocent little
prattler and the thoughtful sage. Even the rude unlettered rustic
betrays some feeling for the beautiful in the presence of the lovely
little community of the field and garden. He has no sympathy for the
stars: they are too mystical and remote. But the flowers as they blush
and smile beneath his eye may stir the often deeply hidden lovingness
and gentleness of his nature. They have a social and domestic aspect to
which no one with a human heart can be quite indifferent. Few can doat
upon the distant flowers of the sky as many of us doat upon the flowers
at our feet. The stars are wholly independent of man: not so the sweet
children of Flora. We tend upon and cherish them with a parental pride.
They seem especially meant for man and man for them. They often need his
kindest nursing. We place them with guardian hand in the brightest light
and the most wholesome air. We quench with liquid life their sun-raised
thirst, or shelter them from the wintry blast, or prepare and enrich
their nutritious beds. As they pine or prosper they agitate us with
tender anxieties, or thrill us with exultation and delight. In the
little plot of ground that fronts an English cottage the flowers are
like members of the household. They are of the same family. They are
almost as lovely as the children that play with them--though their happy
human associates may be amongst
The sweetest things that ever grew
Beside a human door.
The Greeks called flowers the _Festival of the eye_: and so they are:
but they are something else, and something better.
A flower is not a flower alone,
A thousand sanctities invest it.
Flowers not only touch the heart; they also elevate the soul. They bind
us not entirely to earth; though they make earth delightful. They
attract our thoughts downward to the richly embroidered ground only to
raise them up again to heaven. If the stars are the scriptures of the
sky, the flowers are the scriptures of the earth. If the stars are a
more glorious revelation of the Creator's majesty and might, the flowers
are at least as sweet a revelation of his gentler attributes. It has
been observed that
An undevout astronomer is mad.
The same thing may be said of an irreverent floriculturist, and with
equal truth--perhaps indeed with greater. For the astronomer, in some
cases, may be hard and cold, from indulging in habits of thought too
exclusively mathematical. But the true lover of flowers has always
something gentle and genial in his nature. He never looks upon his
floral-family without a sweetened smile upon his face and a softened
feeling in his heart; unless his temperament be strangely changed and
his mind disordered. The poets, who, speaking generally, are
constitutionally religious, are always delighted readers of the
flower-illumined pages of the book of nature. One of these disciples of
Flora earnestly exclaims:
Were I, O God, in churchless lands remaining
Far from all voice of teachers and divines,
My soul would find in flowers of thy ordaining
Priests, sermons, shrines
The popular little preachers of the field and garden, with their lovely
faces, and angelic language--sending the while such ambrosial incense up
to heaven--insinuate the sweetest truths into the human heart. They lead
us to the delightful conclusion that beauty is in the list of
the _utilities_--that the Divine Artist himself is _a lover of
loveliness_--that he has communicated a taste for it to his creatures
and most lavishly provided for its gratification.
Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odours, and imparts then hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the sea side sands
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth.
_Cowper_.
In the eye of Utilitarianism the flowers are but idle shows. God might
indeed have made this world as plain as a Quaker's garment, without
retrenching one actual necessary of physical existence; but He has
chosen otherwise; and no earthly potentate was ever so richly clad as
his mother earth. "Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not,
neither do they toil, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these!" We are thus instructed that man was not meant to live by
bread alone, and that the gratification of a sense of beauty is equally
innocent and natural and refining. The rose is permitted to spread its
sweet leaves to the air and dedicate its beauty to the sun, in a way
that is quite perplexing to bigots and stoics and political economists.
Yet God has made nothing in vain! The Great Artist of the Universe must
have scattered his living hues and his forms of grace over the surface
of the earth for some especial and worthy purpose. When Voltaire was
congratulated on the rapid growth of his plants, he observed that "_they
had nothing else to do_." Oh, yes--they had something else to do,--they
had to adorn the earth, and to charm the human eye, and through the eye
to soften and cheer the heart and elevate the soul!
I have often wished that Lecturers on Botany, instead of confining their
instructions to the mere physiology, or anatomy, or classification or
nomenclature of their favorite science, would go more into the poetry
of it, and teach young people to appreciate the moral influences of the
floral tribes--to draw honey for the human heart from the sweet breasts
of flowers--to sip from their radiant chalices a delicious medicine for
the soul.
Flowers are frequently hallowed by associations far sweeter than their
sweetest perfume. "I am no botanist:" says Southey in a letter to Walter
Savage Landor, "but like you, my earliest and best recollections are
connected with flowers, and they always carry me back to other days.
Perhaps this is because they are the only things which affect our senses
precisely as they did in our childhood. The sweetness of the violet is
always the same; and when you rifle a rose and drink, as it were, its
fragrance, the refreshment is the same to the old man as to the boy.
Sounds recal the past in the same manner, but they do not bring with
them individual scenes like the cowslip field, or the corner of the
garden to which we have transplanted field-flowers."
George Wither has well said in commendation of his Muse:
Her divine skill taught me this;
That from every thing I saw
I could some instruction draw,
And raise pleasure to the height
By the meanest object's sight,
By the murmur of a spring
_Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut, when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree_,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man.
We must not interpret the epithet _wiser_ too literally. Perhaps the
poet speaks ironically, or means by some other _wiser man_, one allied
in character and temperament to a modern utilitarian Philosopher.
Wordsworth seems to have had the lines of George Wither in his mind when
he said
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Thomas Campbell, with a poet's natural gallantry, has exclaimed,
Without the smile from partial Beauty won,
Oh! what were man?--a world without a sun!
Let a similar compliment be presented to the "painted populace that
dwell in fields and lead ambrosial lives." What a desert were this scene
without its flowers--it would be like the sky of night without its
stars! "The disenchanted earth" would "lose her lustre." Stars of the
day! Beautifiers of the world! Ministrants of delight! Inspirers of
kindly emotions and the holiest meditations! Sweet teachers of the
serenest wisdom! So beautiful and bright, and graceful, and fragrant--it
is no marvel that ye are equally the favorites of the rich and the poor,
of the young and the old, of the playful and the pensive!
Our country, though originally but sparingly endowed with the living
jewelry of nature, is now rich in the choicest flowers of all other
countries.
Foreigners of many lands,
They form one social shade, as if convened
By magic summons of the Orphean lyre.
_Cowper_.
These little "foreigners of many lands" have been so skilfully
acclimatized and multiplied and rendered common, that for a few
shillings an English peasant may have a parterre more magnificent than
any ever gazed upon by the Median Queen in the hanging gardens of
Babylon. There is no reason, indeed, to suppose that even the first
parents of mankind looked on finer flowers in Paradise itself than are
to be found in the cottage gardens that are so thickly distributed over
the hills and plains and vallies of our native land.
The red rose, is the red rose still, and from the lily's cup
An odor fragrant as at first, like frankincense goes up.
_Mary Howitt_.
Our neat little gardens and white cottages give to dear old England that
lovely and cheerful aspect, which is so striking and attractive to her
foreign visitors. These beautiful signs of a happy political security
and individual independence and domestic peace and a love of order and a
homely refinement, are scattered all over the land, from sea to sea.
When Miss Sedgwick, the American authoress, visited England, nothing so
much surprised and delighted her as the gay flower-filled gardens of our
cottagers. Many other travellers, from almost all parts of the world,
have experienced and expressed the same sensations on visiting our
shores, and it would be easy to compile a voluminous collection of their
published tributes of admiration. To a foreign visitor the whole country
seems a garden--in the words of Shakespeare--"a _sea-walled garden_."
In the year 1843, on a temporary return to England after a long Indian
exile, I travelled by railway for the first time in my life. As I glided
on, as smoothly as in a sledge, over the level iron road, with such
magical rapidity--from the pretty and cheerful town of Southampton to
the greatest city of the civilized world--every thing was new to me, and
I gave way to child-like wonder and child-like exultation.[002] What a
quick succession of lovely landscapes greeted the eye on either side?
What a garden-like air of universal cultivation! What beautiful smooth
slopes! What green, quiet meadows! What rich round trees, brooding over
their silent shadows! What exquisite dark nooks and romantic lanes! What
an aspect of unpretending happiness in the clean cottages, with their
little trim gardens! What tranquil grandeur and rural luxury in the
noble mansions and glorious parks of the British aristocracy! How the
love of nature thrilled my heart with a gentle and delicious agitation,
and how proud I felt of my dear native land! It is, indeed, a fine thing
to be an Englishman. Whether at home or abroad, he is made conscious of
the claims of his country to respect and admiration. As I fed my eyes on
the loveliness of Nature, or turned to the miracles of Art and Science
on every hand, I had always in my mind a secret reference to the effect
which a visit to England must produce upon an intelligent and observant
foreigner.
Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around
Of hills and dales and woods and lawns and spires,
And glittering towns and gilded streams, 'till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays!
Happy Brittannia! where the Queen of Arts,
Inspiring vigor, Liberty, abroad
Walks unconfined, even to thy farthest cots,
And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.
_Thomson_.
And here let me put in a word in favor of the much-abused English
climate. I cannot echo the unpatriotic discontent of Byron when he
speaks of
The cold and cloudy clime
Where he was born, but where he would not die.
Rather let me say with the author of "_The Seasons_," in his address to
England.
Rich is thy soil and merciful thy clime.
King Charles the Second when he heard some foreigners condemning our
climate and exulting in their own, observed that in his opinion that was
the best climate in which a man could be out in the open air with
pleasure, or at least without trouble and inconvenience, the most days
of the year and the most hours of the day; and this he held was the case
with the climate of England more than that of any other country in
Europe. To say nothing of the lovely and noble specimens of human nature
to which it seems so congenial, I may safely assert that it is
peculiarly favorable, with, rare exceptions, to the sweet children of
Flora. There is no country in the world in which there are at this day
such innumerable tribes of flowers. There are in England two thousand
varieties of the rose alone, and I venture to express a doubt whether
the richest gardens of Persia or Cashmere could produce finer specimens
of that universal favorite than are to be found in some of the small but
highly cultivated enclosures of respectable English rustics.
The actual beauty of some of the commonest flowers in our gardens can be
in no degree exaggerated--even in the daydreams of the most inspired
poet. And when the author of Lalla Rookh talks so musically and
pleasantly of the fragrant bowers of Amberabad, the country of Delight,
a Province in Jinnistan or Fairy Land, he is only thinking of the
shrubberies and flower-beds at Sloperton Cottage, and the green hills
and vales of Wiltshire.
Sir William Temple observes that "besides the temper of our climate
there are two things particular to us, that contribute much to the
beauty and elegance of our gardens--which are, _the gravel of our walks
and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf_."
"The face of England is so beautiful," says Horace Walpole, "that I do
not believe that Tempe or Arcadia was half so rural; for both lying in
hot climates must have wanted _the moss of our gardens_." Meyer, a
German, a scientific practical gardener, who was also a writer on
gardening, and had studied his art in the Royal Gardens at Paris, and
afterwards visited England, was a great admirer of English Gardens, but
despaired of introducing our style of gardening into Germany, _chiefly
on account of its inferior turf for lawns_. "Lawns and gravel walks,"
says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "are the pride of English
Gardens," "The smoothness and verdure of our lawns," continues the same
writer, "is the first thing in our gardens that catches the eye of a
foreigner; the next is the fineness and firmness of our gravel walks."
Mr. Charles Mackintosh makes the same observation. "In no other country
in the world," he says, "do such things exist." Mrs. Stowe, whose _Uncle
Tom_ has done such service to the cause of liberty in America, on her
visit to England seems to have been quite as much enchanted with our
scenery, as was her countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick. I am pleased to find
Mrs. Stowe recognize the superiority of English landscape-gardening and
of our English verdure. She speaks of, "the princely art of
landscape-gardening, for which England is so famous," and of "_vistas of
verdure and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green_ as the
velvet moss sometimes seen growing on rocks in new England." "Grass," she
observes, "is an art and a science in England--it is an institution. The
pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling and
otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the often-falling
tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be
appreciated." This is literally true: any sight more inexpressibly
exquisite than that of an English lawn in fine order is what I am quite
unable to conceive.[003]
I recollect that in one of my visits to England, (in 1827) I attempted
to describe the scenery of India to William Hazlitt--not the living son
but the dead father. Would that he were still in the land of the living
by the side of his friend Leigh Hunt, who has been pensioned by the
Government for his support of that cause for which they were both so
bitterly persecuted by the ruling powers in days gone by. I flattered
myself into the belief that Hazlitt was interested in some of my
descriptions of Oriental scenes. What moved him most was an account of
the dry, dusty, burning, grassless plains of Bundelcund in the hot
season. I told him how once while gasping for breath in a hot verandah
and leaning over the rails I looked down upon the sun-baked ground.
"A change came o'er the spirit of my dream."
I suddenly beheld with all the distinctness of reality the rich, cool,
green, unrivalled meads of England. But the vision soon melted away, and
I was again in exile. I wept like a child. It was like a beautiful
mirage of the desert, or one of those waking dreams of home which have
sometimes driven the long-voyaging seaman to distraction and urged him
by an irresistible impulse to plunge headlong into the ocean.
When I had once more crossed the wide Atlantic--and (not by the
necromancy of imagination but by a longer and more tedious transit)
found myself in an English meadow,--I exclaimed with the poet,
Thou art free
My country! and 'tis joy enough and pride
For one hour's perfect bliss, _to tread the grass
Of England once again_.
I felt my childhood for a time renewed, and was by no means disposed to
second the assertion that
"Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower."
I have never beheld any thing more lovely than scenery
characteristically English; and Goldsmith, who was something of a
traveller, and had gazed on several beautiful countries, was justified
in speaking with such affectionate admiration of our still more
beautiful England,
Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride.
It is impossible to put into any form of words the faintest
representation of that delightful summer feeling which, is excited in
fine weather by the sight of the mossy turf of our country. It is sweet
indeed to go,
Musing through the _lawny_ vale:
alluded to by Warton, or over Milton's "level downs," or to climb up
Thomson's
Stupendous rocks
That from the sun-redoubling valley lift
Cool to the middle air their _lawny_ tops.
It gives the Anglo-Indian Exile the heart-ache to think of these
ramblings over English scenes.
ENGLAND.
Bengala's plains are richly green,
Her azure skies of dazzling sheen,
Her rivers vast, her forests grand.
Her bowers brilliant,--but the land,
Though dear to countless eyes it be,
And fair to mine, hath not for me
The charm ineffable of _home_;
For still I yearn to see the foam
Of wild waves on thy pebbled shore,
Dear Albion! to ascend once more
Thy snow-white cliffs; to hear again
The murmur of thy circling main--
To stroll down each romantic dale
Beloved in boyhood--to inhale
Fresh life on green and breezy hills--
To trace the coy retreating rills--
To see the clouds at summer-tide
Dappling all the landscape wide--
To mark the varying gloom and glow
As the seasons come and go--
Again the green meads to behold
Thick strewn with silvery gems and gold,
Where kine, bright-spotted, large, and sleek,
Browse silently, with aspect meek,
Or motionless, in shallow stream
Stand mirror'd, till their twin shapes seem,
Feet linked to feet, forbid to sever,
By some strange magic fixed for ever.
And oh! once more I fain would see
(Here never seen) a poor man _free_,[004]
And valuing more an humble name,
But stainless, than a guilty fame,
How sacred is the simplest cot,
Where Freedom dwells!--where she is not
How mean the palace! Where's the spot
She loveth more than thy small isle,
Queen of the sea? Where hath her smile
So stirred man's inmost nature? Where
Are courage firm, and virtue fair,
And manly pride, so often found
As in rude huts on English ground,
Where e'en the serf who slaves for hire
May kindle with a freeman's fire?
How proud a sight to English eyes
Are England's village families!
The patriarch, with his silver hair,
The matron grave, the maiden fair.
The rose-cheeked boy, the sturdy lad,
On Sabbath day all neatly clad:--
Methinks I see them wend their way
On some refulgent morn of May,
By hedgerows trim, of fragrance rare,
Towards the hallowed House of Prayer!
I can love _all_ lovely lands,
But England _most_; for she commands.
As if she bore a parent's part,
The dearest movements of my heart;
And here I may not breathe her name.
Without a thrill through all my frame.
Never shall this heart be cold
To thee, my country! till the mould
(Or _thine_ or _this_) be o'er it spread.
And form its dark and silent bed.
I never think of bliss below
But thy sweet hills their green heads show,
Of love and beauty never dream.
But English faces round me gleam!
D.L.R.
I have often observed that children never wear a more charming aspect
than when playing in fields and gardens. In another volume I have
recorded some of my impressions respecting the prominent interest
excited by these little flowers of humanity in an English landscape.
* * * * *
THE RETURN TO ENGLAND.
When I re-visited my dear native country, after an absence of many weary
years, and a long dull voyage, my heart was filled with unutterable
delight and admiration. The land seemed a perfect paradise. It was in
the spring of the year. The blue vault of heaven--the clear
atmosphere--the balmy vernal breeze--the quiet and picturesque cattle,
browsing on luxuriant verdure, or standing knee deep in a crystal
lake--the hills sprinkled with snow-white sheep and sometimes partially
shadowed by a wandering cloud--the meadows glowing with golden butter-cups
and be-dropped with daisies--the trim hedges of crisp and sparkling
holly--the sound of near but unseen rivulets, and the songs of
foliage-hidden birds--the white cottages almost buried amidst trees, like
happy human nests--the ivy-covered church, with its old grey spire
"pointing up to heaven," and its gilded vane gleaming in the light--the
sturdy peasants with their instruments of healthy toil--the white-capped
matrons bleaching their newly-washed garments in the sun, and throwing
them like snow-patches on green slopes, or glossy garden shrubs--the
sun-browned village girls, resting idly on their round elbows at small
open casements, their faces in sweet keeping with the trellised
flowers:--all formed a combination of enchantments that would mock the
happiest imitative efforts of human art. But though the bare enumeration
of the details of this English picture, will, perhaps, awaken many dear
recollections in the reader's mind, I have omitted by far the most
interesting feature of the whole scene--_the rosy children, loitering
about the cottage gates, or tumbling gaily on the warm grass_.[005][006]
Two scraps of verse of a similar tendency shall follow this prose
description:--
AN ENGLISH LANDSCAPE.
I stood, upon an English hill,
And saw the far meandering rill,
A vein of liquid silver, run
Sparkling in the summer sun;
While adown that green hill's side,
And along the valley wide,
Sheep, like small clouds touched with light,
Or like little breakers bright,
Sprinkled o'er a smiling sea,
Seemed to float at liberty.
Scattered all around were seen,
White cots on the meadows green.
Open to the sky and breeze,
Or peeping through the sheltering trees,
On a light gate, loosely hung,
Laughing children gaily swung;
Oft their glad shouts, shrill and clear,
Came upon the startled ear.
Blended with the tremulous bleat,
Of truant lambs, or voices sweet,
Of birds, that take us by surprise,
And mock the quickly-searching eyes.
Nearer sat a fair-haired boy,
Whistling with a thoughtless joy;
A shepherd's crook was in his hand,
Emblem of a mild command;
And upon his rounded cheek
Were hues that ripened apples streak.
Disease, nor pain, nor sorrowing,
Touched that small Arcadian king;
His sinless subjects wandered free--
Confusion without anarchy.
Happier he upon his throne.
The breezy hill--though all alone--
Than the grandest monarchs proud
Who mistrust the kneeling crowd.
On a gently rising ground,
The lovely valley's farthest bound,
Bordered by an ancient wood,
The cots in thicker clusters stood;
And a church, uprose between,
Hallowing the peaceful scene.
Distance o'er its old walls threw
A soft and dim cerulean hue,
While the sun-lit gilded spire
Gleamed as with celestial fire!
I have crossed the ocean wave,
Haply for a foreign grave;
Haply never more to look
On a British hill or brook;
Haply never more to hear
Sounds unto my childhood dear;
Yet if sometimes on my soul
Bitter thoughts beyond controul
Throw a shade more dark than night,
Soon upon the mental sight
Flashes forth a pleasant ray
Brighter, holier than the day;
And unto that happy mood
All seems beautiful and good.
D.L.R.
LINES TO A LADY,
WHO PRESENTED THE AUTHOR WITH SOME ENGLISH FRUITS AND FLOWERS.
Green herbs and gushing springs in some hot waste
Though, grateful to the traveller's sight and taste,
Seem far less sweet and fair than fruits and flowers
That breathe, in foreign lands, of English bowers.
Thy gracious gift, dear lady, well recalls
Sweet scenes of home,--the white cot's trellised walls--
The trim red garden path--the rustic seat--
The jasmine-covered arbour, fit retreat
For hearts that love repose. Each spot displays
Some long-remembered charm. In sweet amaze
I feel as one who from a weary dream
Of exile wakes, and sees the morning beam
Illume the glorious clouds of every hue
That float o'er scenes his happy childhood knew.
How small a spark may kindle fancy's flame
And light up all the past! The very same
Glad sounds and sights that charmed my heart of old
Arrest me now--I hear them and behold.
Ah! yonder is the happy circle seated
Within, the favorite bower! I am greeted
With joyous shouts; my rosy boys have heard
A father's voice--their little hearts are stirred
With eager hope of some new toy or treat
And on they rush, with never-resting feet!
* * * * *
Gone is the sweet illusion--like a scene
Formed by the western vapors, when between
The dusky earth, and day's departing light
The curtain falls of India's sudden night.
D.L.R.
The verdant carpet embroidered with little stars of gold and silver--the
short-grown, smooth, and close-woven, but most delicate and elastic
fresh sward--so soothing to the dazzled eye, so welcome to the wearied
limbs--so suggestive of innocent and happy thoughts,--so refreshing to
the freed visitor, long pent up in the smoky city--is surely no where to
be seen in such exquisite perfection as on the broad meadows and
softly-swelling hills of England. And perhaps in no country in the world
could _pic-nic_ holiday-makers or playful children with more perfect
security of life and health stroll about or rest upon Earth's richly
enamelled floor from sunrise to sunset on a summer's day. No Englishman
would dare to stretch himself at full length and address himself to sleep
upon an Oriental meadow unless he were perfectly indifferent to life
itself and could see nothing terrible in the hostility of the deadliest
reptiles. When wading through the long grass and thick jungles of Bengal,
he is made to acknowledge the full force of the true and beautiful
expression--"_In the midst of life we are in death_." The British Indian
exile on his return home is delighted with the "sweet security" of his
native fields. He may then feel with Wordsworth how
Dear is the forest frowning o'er his head.
And dear _the velvet greensward_ to his tread.
Or he may exclaim in the words of poor Keats--now slumbering under a
foreign turf--
Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than her own.
It is a pleasing proof of the fine moral influence of natural scenery
that the most ceremonious strangers can hardly be long seated together
in the open air on the "velvet greensward" without casting off for a
while the cold formalities of artificial life, and becoming as frank and
social as ingenuous school-boys. Nature breathes peace and geniality
into almost every human heart.
"John Thelwall," says Coleridge, "had something very good about him. We
were sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him
'Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!' 'Nay, Citizen
Samuel,' replied he, 'it is rather a place to make us forget that there
is any necessity for treason!'"
Leigh Hunt, who always looks on nature with the eye of a true painter
and the imagination of a true poet, has represented with delightful
force and vividness some of those accidents of light and shade that
diversify an English meadow.
RAIN AND SUNSHINE IN MAY.
"Can any thing be more lovely, than the meadows between the rains of
May, when the sun smites them on the sudden like a painter, and they
laugh up at him, as if he had lighted a loving cheek!
I speak of a season when the returning threats of cold and the resisting
warmth of summer time, make robust mirth in the air; when the winds
imitate on a sudden the vehemence of winter; and silver-white clouds are
abrupt in their coming down and shadows on the grass chase one another,
panting, over the fields, like a pursuit of spirits. With undulating
necks they pant forward, like hounds or the leopard.
See! the cloud is after the light, gliding over the country like the
shadow of a god; and now the meadows are lit up here and there with
sunshine, as if the soul of Titian were standing in heaven, and playing
his fancies on them. Green are the trees in shadow; but the trees in the
sun how twenty-fold green _they_ are--rich and variegated with gold!"
One of the many exquisite out-of-doors enjoyments for the observers of
nature, is the sight of an English harvest. How cheering it is to behold
the sickles flashing in the sun, as the reapers with well sinewed arm,
and with a sweeping movement, mow down the close-arrayed ranks of the
harvest field! What are "the rapture of the strife" and all the "pomp,
pride and circumstance of glorious war," that bring death to some and
agony and grief to others, compared with the green and golden trophies
of the honest Husbandman whose bloodless blade makes no wife a widow, no
child an orphan,--whose office is not to spread horror and desolation
through shrieking cities, but to multiply and distribute the riches of
nature over a smiling land.
But let us quit the open fields for a time, and turn again to the
flowery retreats of
Retired Leisure
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.
In all ages, in all countries, in all creeds, a garden is represented as
the scene not only of earthly but of celestial enjoyment. The ancients
had their Elysian Fields and the garden of the Hesperides, the Christian
has his Garden of Eden, the Mahommedan his Paradise of groves and
flowers and crystal fountains and black eyed Houries.
"God Almighty," says Lord Bacon, "first planted a garden; and indeed it
is the purest of all pleasures: it is the greatest refreshment to the
spirits of man." Bacon, though a utilitarian philosopher, was such a
lover of flowers that he was never satisfied unless he saw them in
almost every room of his house, and when he came to discourse of them in
his Essays, his thoughts involuntarily moved harmonious numbers. How
naturally the following prose sentence in Bacon's Essay on Gardens
almost resolves itself into verse.
"For the heath which was the first part of our plot, I wish it to be
framed as much as may be to a natural wildness. Trees I would have none
in it, but some thickets made only of sweet briar and honeysuckle, and
some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries
and primroses; for these are sweet, and prosper in the shade."
"For the heath which was the third part of our plot--
I wish it to be framed
As much as may be to a natural wildness.
Trees I'd have none in't, but some thickets made
Only of sweet-briar and honey-suckle,
And some wild vine amongst; and the ground set
With violets, strawberries, and primroses;
For these are sweet and prosper in the shade."
It has been observed that the love of gardens is the only passion which
increases with age. It is generally the most indulged in the two
extremes of life. In middle age men are often too much involved in the
affairs of the busy world fully to appreciate the tranquil pleasures in
the gift of Flora. Flowers are the toys of the young and a source of the
sweetest and serenest enjoyments for the old. But there is no season of
life for which they are unfitted and of which they cannot increase the
charm.
"Give me," says the poet Rogers, "a garden well kept, however small, two
or three spreading trees and a mind at ease, and I defy the world." The
poet adds that he would not have his garden, too much extended. He seems
to think it possible to have too much of a good thing. "Three acres of
flowers and a regiment of gardeners," he says, "bring no more pleasure
than a sufficiency." "A hundred thousand roses," he adds, "which we look
at _en masse_, do not identify themselves in the same manner as even a
very small border; and hence, if the cottager's mind is properly
attuned, the little cottage-garden may give him more real delight than
belongs to the owner of a thousand acres." In a smaller garden "we
become acquainted, as it were," says the same poet, "and even form
friendships with, individual flowers." It is delightful to observe how
nature thus adjusts the inequalities of fortune and puts the poor man,
in point of innocent happiness, on a level with the rich. The man of the
most moderate means may cultivate many elegant tastes, and may have
flowers in his little garden that the greatest sovereign in the world
might enthusiastically admire. Flowers are never vulgar. A rose from a
peasant's patch of ground is as fresh and elegant and fragrant as if it
had been nurtured in a Royal parterre, and it would not be out of place
in the richest porcelain vase of the most aristocratical drawing-room in
Europe. The poor man's flower is a present for a princess, and of all
gifts it is the one least liable to be rejected even by the haughty. It
might he worn on the fair brow or bosom of Queen Victoria with a nobler
grace than the costliest or most elaborate production of the goldsmith
or the milliner.
The majority of mankind, in the most active spheres of life, have
moments in which they sigh for rural retirement, and seldom dream of
such a retreat without making a garden the leading charm of it. Sir
Henry Wotton says that Lord Bacon's garden was one of the best that he
had seen either at home or abroad. Evelyn, the author of "Sylva, or a
Discourse of Forest Trees," dwells with fond admiration, and a pleasing
egotism, on the charms of his own beautiful and highly cultivated estate
at Wooton in the county of Surrey. He tells us that the house is large
and ancient and is "sweetly environed with delicious streams and
venerable woods." "I will say nothing," he continues, "of the air,
because the pre-eminence is universally given to Surrey, the soil being
dry and sandy; but I should speak much of the gardens, fountains and
groves that adorn it, were they not generally known to be amongst the
most natural, and (till this later and universal luxury of the whole
nation, since abounding in such expenses) the most magnificent that
England afforded, and which indeed gave one of the first examples to
that elegancy, since so much in vogue and followed, for the managing of
their waters and other elegancies of that nature." Before he came into
the possession of his paternal estate he resided at _Say's Court_, near
Deptford, an estate which he possessed by purchase, and where he had a
superb holly hedge four hundred feet long, nine feet high and five feet
broad. Of this hedge, he was particularly proud, and he exultantly asks,
"Is there under heaven a more glorious and refreshing object of the
kind?" When the Czar of Muscovy visited England in 1698 to instruct
himself in the art of ship-building, he had the use of Evelyn's house
and garden, at _Say's Court_, and while there did so much damage to the
latter that the owner loudly and bitterly complained. At last the
Government gave Evelyn L150 as an indemnification. Czar Peter's favorite
amusement was to ride in a wheel barrow through what its owner had once
called the "impregnable hedge of holly." Evelyn was passionately fond of
gardening. "The life and felicity of an excellent gardener," he
observes, "is preferable to all other diversions." His faith in the art
of Landscape-gardening was unwavering. It could _remove mountains_. Here
is an extract from his Diary.
"Gave his brother some directions about his garden" (at Wooton
Surrey), "which, he was desirous to put into some form, for
which he was to remove a mountain overgrown with large trees and
thickets and a moat within ten yards of the house."
No sooner said than done. His brother dug down the mountain and
"flinging it into a rapid stream (which carried away the sand) filled up
the moat and levelled that noble area where now the garden and fountain
is."
Though Evelyn dearly loved a garden, his chief delight was not in
flowers but in forest trees, and he was more anxious to improve the
growth of plants indigenous to the soil than to introduce exotics.[007]
Sir William Temple was so attached to his garden, that he left
directions in his will that his heart should be buried there. It was
enclosed in a silver box and placed under a sun-dial.
Dr. Thomson Reid, the eminent Scottish metaphysician, used to be found
working in his garden in his eighty-seventh year.
The name of Chatham is in the long list of eminent men who have enjoyed
a garden. We are told that "he loved the country: took peculiar pleasure
in gardening; and had an extremely happy taste in laying out grounds."
What a delightful thing it must have been for that great statesman, thus
to relieve his mind from the weight of public care in the midst of quiet
bowers planted and trained by his own hand!
Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, notices the attractions of a
garden as amongst the finest remedies for depression of the mind. I must
give the following extracts from his quaint but interesting pages.
"To see the pleasant fields, the crystal fountains,
And take the gentle air amongst the mountains.
"To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours,
artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns,
rivulets, fountains, and such like pleasant places, (like that
Antiochian Daphne,) brooks, pools, fishponds, between wood and water, in
a fair meadow, by a river side, _ubi variae avium cantationes, florum
colores, pratorum frutices_, &c. to disport in some pleasant plain, or
park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat, must needs
be a delectable recreation. _Hortus principis et domus ad delectationem
facta, cum sylva, monte et piscina, vulgo la montagna_: the prince's
garden at Ferrara, Schottus highly magnifies, with the groves,
mountains, ponds, for a delectable prospect; he was much affected with
it; a Persian paradise, or pleasant park, could not be more delectable
in his sight. St. Bernard, in the description of his monastery, is
almost ravished with the pleasures of it. "A sick man (saith he) sits
upon a green bank, and when the dog-star parcheth the plains, and dries
up rivers, he lies in a shady bower," _Fronde sub arborea ferventia
temperat astra_, "and feeds his eyes with variety of objects, herbs,
trees, to comfort his misery; he receives many delightsome smells, and
fills his ears with that sweet and various harmony of birds; _good God_,
(saith he), _what a company of pleasures hast thou made for man!_"
* * * * *
"The country hath his recreations, the city his several gymnics and
exercises, May games, feasts, wakes, and merry meetings to solace
themselves; the very being in the country; that life itself is a
sufficient recreation to some men, to enjoy such pleasures, as those old
patriarchs did. Dioclesian, the emperor, was so much affected with it,
that he gave over his sceptre, and turned gardener. Constantine wrote
twenty books of husbandry. Lysander, when ambassadors came to see him,
bragged of nothing more than of his orchard, _hi sunt ordines mei_. What
shall I say of Cincinnatus, Cato, Tully, and many such? how they have
been pleased with it, to prune, plant, inoculate and graft, to show so
many several kinds of pears, apples, plums, peaches, &c."
The Romans of all ranks made use of flowers as ornaments and emblems,
but they were not generally so fond of directing or assisting the
gardener, or taking the spade or hoe into their own hands, as are the
British peasantry, gentry and nobility of the present day. They were not
amateur Florists. They prized highly their fruit trees and pastures and
cool grottoes and umbrageous groves; but they expended comparatively
little time, skill or taste upon the flower-garden. Even their love of
nature, though thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that
minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our
best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats
were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa,
so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear
to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if
compared with Pope's retreat at Twickenham. The ancients had a taste for
the _rural_, not for the _gardenesque_, nor perhaps even for the
_picturesque_. The English have a taste for all three. Hence they have
good landscape-gardeners and first-rate landscape-painters. The old
Romans had neither. But though, some of our Spitalfields weavers have
shown a deeper love, and perhaps even a finer taste, for flowers, than
were exhibited by the citizens of Rome, abundant evidence is furnished
to us by the poets in all ages and in all countries that nature, in some
form or another has ever charmed the eye and the heart of man. The
following version of a famous passage in Virgil, especially the lines in
Italics, may give the English reader some idea of a Roman's dream of
RURAL HAPPINESS.
Ah! happy Swains! if they their bliss but knew,
Whom, far from boisterous war, Earth's bosom true
With easy food supplies. If they behold
No lofty dome its gorgeous gates unfold
And pour at morn from all its chambers wide
Of flattering visitants the mighty tide;
Nor gaze on beauteous columns richly wrought,
Or tissued robes, or busts from Corinth brought;
Nor their white wool with Tyrian poison soil,
Nor taint with Cassia's bark their native oil;
_Yet peace is theirs; a life true bliss that yields;
And various wealth; leisure mid ample fields,
Grottoes, and living lakes, and vallies green,
And lowing herds; and 'neath a sylvan screen,
Delicious slumbers. There the lawn and cave
With beasts of chase abound._ The young ne'er crave
A prouder lot; their patient toil is cheered;
Their Gods are worshipped and their sires revered;
And there when Justice passed from earth away
She left the latest traces of her sway.
D.L.R.
Lord Bacon was perhaps the first Englishman who endeavored to reform the
old system of English gardening, and to show that it was contrary to
good taste and an insult to nature. "As for making knots or figures," he
says, "with divers colored earths, that may lie under the windows of the
house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may
see as good sights many times in tarts." Bacon here alludes, I suppose,
to the old Dutch fashion of dividing flowerbeds into many compartments,
and instead of filling them with flowers, covering one with red brick
dust, another with charcoal, a third with yellow sand, a fourth with
chalk, a fifth with broken China, and others with green glass, or with
spars and ores. But Milton, in his exquisite description of the garden
of Eden, does not allude to the same absurd fashion when he speaks of
"curious knots,"
Which not nice art,
In beds and _curious knots_, but nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain.
By these _curious knots_ the poet seems to allude, not to figures of
"divers colored earth," but to the artificial and complicated
arrangements and divisions of flowers and flower-beds.
Though Bacon went not quite so freely to nature as our latest
landscape-gardeners have done, he made the _first step_ in the right
direction and deserves therefore the compliment which Mason has paid him
in his poem of _The English Garden_.
On thy realm
Philosophy his sovereign lustre spread;
Yet did he deign to light with casual glance
The wilds of Taste, Yes, sagest Verulam,
'Twas thine to banish from the royal groves
Each childish vanity of crisped knot[008]
And sculptured foliage; to the lawn restore
Its ample space, and bid it feast the sight
With verdure pure, unbroken, unabridged;
For verdure soothes the eye, as roseate sweets
The smell, or music's melting strains the ear.
Yes--"_verdure soothes the eye_:"--and the mind too. Bacon himself
observes, that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
kept finely shorn." Mason slightly qualifies his commendation of "the
sage" by admitting that he had not quite completed his emancipation from
the bad taste of his day.
Witness his high arched hedge
In pillored state by carpentry upborn,
With colored mirrors decked and prisoned birds.
But, when our step has paced the proud parterre,
And reached the heath, then Nature glads our eye
Sporting in all her lovely carelessness,
There smiles in varied tufts the velvet rose,
There flaunts the gadding woodbine, swells the ground
In gentle hillocks, and around its sides
Through blossomed shades the secret pathway steals.
_The English Garden_.
In one of the notes to _The English Garden_ it is stated that "Bacon was
the prophet, Milton the herald of modern Gardening; and Addison, Pope,
and Kent the champions of true taste." Kent was by profession both a
Painter and a Landscape-Gardener. Addison who had a pretty little
retreat at Bilton, near Rugby, evinces in most of his occasional
allusions to gardens a correct judgment. He complains that even in _his_
time our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, loved to
deviate from it as much as possible. The system of verdant sculpture had
not gone out of fashion. Our trees still rose in cones, globes, and
pyramids. The work of the scissors was on every plant and bush. It was
Pope, however, who did most to bring the topiary style into contempt and
to encourage a more natural taste, by his humorous paper in the
_Guardian_ and his poetical Epistle to the Earl of Burlington. Gray, the
poet, observes in one of his letters, that "our skill in gardening, or
rather laying out grounds, is the only taste we can call our own; the
only proof of original talent in matters of pleasure. This is no small
honor to us;" he continues, "since neither France nor Italy, has ever
had the least notion of it." "Whatever may have been reported, whether
truly or falsely" (says a contributor to _The World_) "of the Chinese
gardens, it is certain that we are the first of the Europeans who have
founded this taste; and we have been so fortunate in the genius of those
who have had the direction of some of the finest spots of ground, that
we may now boast a success equal to that profusion of expense which has
been destined to promote the rapid progress of this happy enthusiasm.
Our gardens are already the astonishment of foreigners, and, in
proportion as they accustom themselves to consider and understand them
will become their admiration." The periodical from which this is taken
was published exactly a century ago, and the writer's prophecy has been
long verified. Foreigners send to us for gardeners to help them to lay
out their grounds in the English fashion. And we are told by the writer
of an interesting article on gardens, in the _Quarterly Review_, that
"the lawns at Paris, to say nothing of Naples, are regularly irrigated
to keep up even the semblance of English verdure; and at the gardens of
Versailles, and Caserta, near Naples, the walks have been supplied from
the Kensington gravel-pits." "It is not probably known," adds the same
writer, "that among our exportations every year is a large quantity of
evergreens for the markets of France and Germany, and that there are
some nurserymen almost wholly engaged in this branch of trade."
Pomfret, a poet of small powers, if a poet at all, has yet contrived to
produce a popular composition in verse--_The Choice_--because he has
touched with great good fortune on some of the sweetest domestic hopes
and enjoyments of his countrymen.
If Heaven the grateful liberty would give
That I might choose my method how to live;
And all those hours propitious Fate should lend
In blissful ease and satisfaction spend;
Near some fair town I'd have a private seat
Built uniform; not little; nor too great:
Better if on a rising ground it stood,
On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood.
_The Choice_.
Pomfret perhaps illustrates the general taste when he places his garden
"_near some fair town_." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired
poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has
the garden of his preference, "_not quite beyond the busy world_."
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass.
Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing
when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the _sound_.
Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the
neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:--
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
_The city's voice itself is soft_, like solitude's.
No doubt the feeling that we are _near_ the crowd but not _in_ it, may
deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that
pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in
This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
_Shakespeare_.
Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical,
desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to
take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love
with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again
when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone.
Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire
to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, "a friend
in my retreat."
To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.
Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a
father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and
friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the
friends are genuine and genial.
All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his
latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and
beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its
banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green
lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers," In this garden
Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It
was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in
1548[009]. In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the
cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those
amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakespeare's tree
was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has
been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice
mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the
Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who
was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great
poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained
under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were
admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by
the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself the
trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to
cut down and root up that interesting--indeed _sacred_ memorial--of the
Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at
this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic
personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his
departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;"
but before he went he completed the fall sum of his sins against good
taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which
Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer
spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a
dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of
residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt
sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of
squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme."
Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
And the sad burden of a merry song.
Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker, got possession of the fragments of
Shakespeare's Mulberry tree, and worked them into all sorts of elegant
ornaments and toys, and disposed of them at great prices. The
corporation of Stratford presented Garrick with the freedom of the town
in a box made of the wood of this famous tree, and the compliment seems
to have suggested to him his public festival or pageant in honor of the
poet. This Jubilee, which was got up with great zeal, and at great
expense and trouble, was attended by vast throngs of the admirers of
Shakespeare from all parts of the kingdom. It was repeated on the stage
and became so popular as a theatrical exhibition that it was represented
night after night for more than half a season to crowded audiences.
Upon the subject of gardens, let us hear what has been said by the
self-styled "melancholy Cowley." When in the smoky city pent, amidst the
busy hum of men, he sighed unceasingly for some green retreat. As he paced
the crowded thorough-fares of London, he thought of the velvet turf and
the pure air of the country. His imagination carried him into secluded
groves or to the bank of a murmuring river, or into some trim and quiet
garden. "I never," he says, "had any other desire so strong and so like
to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be
master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate
conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life
only to the culture of them and the study of nature," The late Miss
Mitford, whose writings breathe so freshly of the nature that she loved
so dearly, realized for herself a similar desire. It is said that she
had the cottage of a peasant with the garden of a Duchess. Cowley is not
contented with expressing in plain prose his appreciation of garden
enjoyments. He repeatedly alludes to them in verse.
Thus, thus (and this deserved great Virgil's praise)
The old Corycian yeoman passed his days;
Thus his wise life Abdolonymus spent;
Th' ambassadors, which the great emperor sent
To offer him a crown, with wonder found
The reverend gardener, hoeing of his ground;
Unwillingly and slow and discontent
From his loved cottage to a throne he went;
And oft he stopped, on his triumphant way:
And oft looked back: and oft was heard to say
Not without sighs, Alas! I there forsake
A happier kingdom than I go to take.
_Lib. IV. Plantarum_.
Here is a similar allusion by the same poet to the delights which great
men amongst the ancients have taken in a rural retirement.
Methinks, I see great Dioclesian walk
In the Salonian garden's noble shade
Which by his own imperial hands was made,
I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk
With the ambassadors, who come in vain
To entice him to a throne again.
"If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show
All the delights which in these gardens grow,
'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,
Than 'tis that you should carry me away:
And trust me not, my friends, if every day
I walk not here with more delight,
Than ever, after the most happy sight
In triumph to the Capitol I rode,
To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god,"
_The Garden_.
Cowley does not omit the important moral which a garden furnishes.
Where does the wisdom and the power divine
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine?
Where do we finer strokes and colors see
Of the Creator's real poetry.
Than when we with attention look
Upon the third day's volume of the book?
If we could open and intend our eye
_We all, like Moses, might espy,
E'en in a bush, the radiant Deity_.
In Leigh Hunt's charming book entitled _The Town_, I find the following
notice of the partiality of poets for houses with gardens attached to
them:--
"It is not surprizing that _garden-houses_ as they were called; should
have formerly abounded in Holborn, in Bunhill Row, and other (at that
time) suburban places. We notice the fact, in order to observe _how fond
the poets were of occupying houses of this description. Milton seems to
have made a point of having one_. The only London residence of Chapman
which is known, was in Old Street Road; doubtless at that time a rural
suburb. Beaumont and Fletcher's house, on the Surrey side of the Thames,
(for they lived as well as wrote together,) most probably had a garden;
and Dryden's house in Gerard Street looked into the garden of the
mansion built by the Earls of Leicester. A tree, or even a flower, put
in a window in the streets of a great city, (and the London citizens, to
their credit, are fond of flowers,) affects the eye something in the
same way as the hand-organs, which bring unexpected music to the ear.
They refresh the common-places of life, shed a harmony through the busy
discord, and appeal to those first sources of emotion, which are
associated with the remembrance of all that is young and innocent."
Milton must have been a passionate lover of flowers and flower-gardens
or he could never have exhibited the exquisite taste and genial feeling
which characterize all the floral allusions and descriptions with which
so much of his poetry is embellished. He lived for some time in a house
in Westminster over-looking the Park. The same house was tenanted by
Jeremy Bentham for forty years. It would be difficult to meet with any
two individuals of more opposite temperaments than the author of
_Paradise Lost_ and the Utilitarian Philosopher. There is or was a stone
in the wall at the end of the garden inscribed TO THE PRINCE OF POETS.
Two beautiful cotton trees overarched the inscription, "and to show"
says Hazlitt, (who subsequently lived in the same house himself,) "how
little the refinements of taste or fancy entered Bentham's system, he
proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the
garden, where he had breathed an air of truth and heaven for near half a
century, into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house
(the cradle of _Paradise Lost_) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled
stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and
forwards to it with their cloven hoofs!"
No poet, ancient or modern, has described a garden on a large scale in
so noble a style as Milton. He has anticipated the finest conceptions of
the latest landscape-gardeners, and infinitely surpassed all the
accounts we have met with of the gardens of the olden time before us.
His Paradise is a
Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned
Or of revived Adonis or renowned
Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son
Or that, not mystic, where the sapient King
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse[010]
The description is too long to quote entire, but I must make room for a
delightful extract. Familiar as it must be to all lovers of poetry, who
will object to read it again and again? Genuine poetry is like a
masterpiece of the painter's art:--we can gaze with admiration for the
hundredth time on a noble picture. The mind and the eye are never
satiated with the truly beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for
ever."
PARADISE.[011]
So on he fares, and to the border comes
Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied: and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene; and as, the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops,
The verdurous wall of Paradise up-sprung:
Which to our general sire gave prospect large
Into his nether empire neighbouring round;
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once, of golden hue,
Appear'd, with gay enamell'd colours mix'd;
On which the sun more glad impress'd his beams,
Than on fair evening cloud, or humid bow.
When God hath shower'd the earth; so lovely seem'd
That landscape: and of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: now gentle gales,
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest; with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.
* * * * *
Southward through Eden went a river large,
Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulf'd; for God had thrown
That mountain as his garden mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears;
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm
And country, whereof here needs no account;
But rather to tell how, if art could tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrown'd the noontide bowers; thus was this place
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich, trees wept odorous gums and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnish'd with golden rind,
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed;
Or palmy hillock, or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crown'd
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove attune,
The trembling leaves, while universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal Spring.
Pope in his grounds at Twickenham, and Shenstone in his garden farm of
the Leasowes, taught their countrymen to understand how much taste and
refinement of soul may be connected with the laying out of gardens and
the cultivation of flowers. I am sorry to learn that the famous retreats
of these poets are not now what they were. The lovely nest of the little
Nightingale of Twickenham has fallen into vulgar hands. And when Mr.
Loudon visited (in 1831) the once beautiful grounds of Shenstone, he
"found them in a state of indescribable neglect and ruin."
Pope said that of all his works that of which he was proudest was his
garden. It was of but five acres, or perhaps less, but to this he is
said to have given a charming variety. He enumerates amongst the friends
who assisted him in the improvement of his grounds, the gallant Earl of
Peterborough "whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines."
Know, all the distant din that world can keep,
Rolls o'er my grotto, and but soothes my sleep.
There my retreat the best companions grace
Chiefs out of war and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;
And he whose lightnings pierced the Iberian lines
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines;
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.
Frederick Prince of Wales took a lively interest in Pope's tasteful
Tusculanum and made him a present of some urns or vases either for his
"laurel circus or to terminate his points." His famous grotto, which he
is so fond of alluding to, was excavated to avoid an inconvenience. His
property lying on both sides of the public highway, he contrived his
highly ornamented passage under the road to preserve privacy and to
connect the two portions of his estate.
The poet has given us in one of his letters a long and lively
description of his subterranean embellishments. But his verse will live
longer than his prose. He has immortalized this grotto, so radiant with
spars and ores and shells, in the following poetical inscription:--
Thou, who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave
Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave,
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill,
Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow,
Approach! Great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine without a wish for gold
Approach--but awful! Lo, the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, ST JOHN sat and thought,
Where British sighs from dying WYNDHAM stole,
And the bright flame was shot thro' MARCHMONT'S soul;
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor
Who dare to love their country, and be poor.
Horace Walpole, speaking of the poet's garden, tells us that "the
passing through the gloom from the grotto to the opening day, the
retiring and again assembling shades, the dusky groves, the larger lawn,
and the solemnity at the cypresses that led up to his mother's tomb,
were managed with exquisite judgment."
Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love,
alluded to by Pope in his sketch of the character of Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, though laid out by Kent, was probably improved by the poet's
suggestions. Walpole seems to think that the beautiful grounds at
Rousham, laid out for General Dormer, were planned on the model of the
garden at Twickenham, at least the opening and retiring "shades of
Venus's Vale." And these grounds at Rousham were pronounced "the most
engaging of all Kent's works." It is said that the design of the garden
at Carlton House, was borrowed from that of Pope.
Wordsworth was correct in his observation that "Landscape gardening is a
liberal art akin to the arts of poetry and painting." Walpole describes
it as "an art that realizes painting and improves nature." "Mahomet," he
adds, "imagined an Elysium, but Kent created many."
Pope's mansion was not a very spacious one, but it was large enough for
a private gentleman of inexpensive habits. After the poet's death it was
purchased by Sir William Stanhope who enlarged both the house and
garden.[012] A bust of Pope, in white marble, has been placed over an
arched way with the following inscription from the pen of Lord Nugent:
The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,
Ill suit the genius of the bard divine;
But fancy now displays a fairer scope
And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope.
I have not heard who set up this bust with its impudent inscription. I
hope it was not Stanhope himself. I cannot help thinking that it would
have been a truer compliment to the memory of Pope if the house and
grounds had been kept up exactly as he had left them. Most people, I
suspect, would greatly have preferred the poet's own "unfolding of his
soul" to that "_unfolding_" attempted for him by a Stanhope and
commemorated by a Nugent. Pope exhibited as much taste in laying out his
grounds as in constructing his poems. Sir William, after his attempt to
make the garden more worthy of the original designer, might just as
modestly have undertaken to enlarge and improve the poetry of Pope on
the plea that it did not sufficiently _unfold his soul_. A line of Lord
Nugent's might in that case have been transferred from the marble bust
to the printed volume:
His fancy now displays a fairer scope.
Or the enlarger and improver might have taken his motto from
Shakespeare:
To my _unfolding_ lend a gracious ear.
This would have been an appropriate motto for the title-page of "_The
Poems of Pope: enlarged and improved: or The Soul of the Poet
Unfolded_."
But in sober truth, Pope, whether as a gardener or as a poet, required
no enlarger or improver of his works. After Sir William Stanhope had
left Pope's villa it came into the possession of Lord Mendip, who
exhibited a proper respect for the poet's memory; but when in 1807 it
was sold to the Baroness Howe, that lady pulled down the house and built
another. The place subsequently came into the possession of a Mr. Young.
The grounds have now no resemblance to what the taste of Pope had once
made them. Even his mother's monument has been removed! Few things would
have more deeply touched the heart of the poet than the anticipation of
this insult to the memory of so revered a parent. His filial piety was
as remarkable as his poetical genius. No passages in his works do him
more honor both as a man and as a poet than those which are mellowed
into a deeper tenderness of sentiment and a softer and sweeter music by
his domestic affections. There are probably few readers of English
poetry who have not the following lines by heart,
Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age;
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath;
Make langour smile, and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep at least one parent from the sky.
In a letter to Swift (dated March 29, 1731) begun by Lord Bolingbroke
and concluded by Pope, the latter speaks thus touchingly of his dear old
parent:
"My Lord has spoken justly of his lady; why not I of my mother?
Yesterday was her birth-day, now entering on the ninety-first year of
her age; her memory much diminished, but her senses very little hurt,
her sight and hearing good; she sleeps not ill, eats moderately, drinks
water, says her prayers; this is all she does. I have reason to thank
God for continuing so long to me a very good and tender parent, and for
allowing me to exercise for some years those cares which are now as
necessary to her, as hers have been to me."
Pope lost his mother two years, two months, and a few days after the
date of this letter. Three days after her death he entreated Richardson,
the painter, to take a sketch of her face, as she lay in her coffin: and
for this purpose Pope somewhat delayed her interment. "I thank God," he
says, "her death was as easy as her life was innocent; and as it cost
her not a groan, nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such
an expression of tranquillity, nay almost of pleasure, that it is even
amiable to behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint
expired, that ever painting drew, and it would be the greatest
obligation which even that obliging art could ever bestow upon a friend
if you would come and sketch it for me." The writer adds, "I shall hope
to see you this evening, as late as you will, or to-morrow morning as
early, _before this winter flower is faded_."
On the small obelisk in the garden, erected by Pope to the memory of his
mother, he placed the following simple and pathetic inscription.
AH! EDITHA!
MATRUM OPTIMA!
MULIERUM AMANTISSIMA!
VALE!
I wonder that any one could have had the heart to remove or to destroy
so interesting a memorial.
It is said that Pope planted his celebrated weeping willow at Twickenham
with his own hands, and that it was the first of its particular species
introduced into England. Happening to be with Lady Suffolk when she
received a parcel from Spain, he observed that it was bound with green
twigs which looked as if they might vegetate. "Perhaps," said he, "these
may produce something that we have not yet in England." He tried a
cutting, and it succeeded. The tree was removed by some person as
barbarous as the reverend gentleman who cut down Shakespeare's Mulberry
Tree. The Willow was destroyed for the same reason, as the Mulberry
Tree--because the owner was annoyed at persons asking to see it. The
Weeping Willow
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream,[013]
has had its interest with people in general much increased by its
association with the history of Napoleon in the Island of St. Helena.
The tree whose boughs seemed to hang so fondly over his remains has now
its scions in all parts of the world. Few travellers visited the tomb
without taking a small cutting of the Napoleon Willow for cultivation in
their own land. Slips of the Willow at Twickenham, like those of the
Willow at St. Helena, have also found their way into many countries. In
1789 the Empress of Russia had some of them planted in her garden at St.
Petersburgh.
Mr. Loudon tells us that there is an old _oak_ in Binfield Wood, Windsor
Forest, which is called _Pope's Oak_, and which bears the inscription
"HERE POPE SANG:"[014] but according to general tradition it was a
_beech_ tree, under which Pope wrote his "Windsor Forest." It is said
that as that tree was decayed, Lady Gower had the inscription alluded to
carved upon another tree near it. Perhaps the substituted tree was an
oak.
I may here mention that in the Vale of Avoca there is a tree celebrated
as that under which Thomas Moore wrote the verses entitled "The meeting
of the Waters."
The allusion to _Pope's Oak_ reminds me that Chaucer is said to have
planted three oak trees in Donnington Park near Newbury. Not one of them
is now, I believe, in existence. There is an oak tree in Windsor Forest
above 1000 years old. In the hollow of this tree twenty people might be
accommodated with standing room. It is called _King's Oak_: it was
William the Conqueror's favorite tree. _Herne's Oak_ in Windsor Park, is
said by some to be still standing, but it is described as a mere
anatomy.
----An old oak whose boughs are mossed with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity.
_As You Like it_.
"It stretches out its bare and sapless branches," says Mr. Jesse, "like
the skeleton arms of some enormous giant, and is almost fearful in its
decay." _Herne's Oak_, as every one knows, is immortalised by
Shakespeare, who has spread its fame over many lands.
There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns,
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle;
And makes milch cows yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit; and well you know,
The superstitious, idle-headed eld
Received, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
_Merry Wives of Windsor_.
"Herne, the hunter" is said to have hung himself upon one of the
branches of this tree, and even,
----Yet there want not many that do fear,
In deep of night to walk by this Herne's Oak.
_Merry Wives of Windsor_.
It was not long ago visited by the King of Prussia to whom Shakespeare
had rendered it an object of great interest.
It is unpleasant to add that there is considerable doubt and dispute as
to its identity. Charles Knight and a Quarterly Reviewer both maintain
that _Herne's Oak_ was cut down with a number of other old trees in
obedience to an order from George the Third when he was not in his right
mind, and that his Majesty deeply regretted the order he had given when
he found that the most interesting tree in his Park had been destroyed.
Mr. Jesse, in his _Gleanings in Natural History_, says that after some
pains to ascertain the truth, he is convinced that this story is not
correct, and that the famous old tree is still standing. He adds that
George the Fourth often alluded to the story and said that though one of
the trees cut down was supposed to have been _Herne's Oak_, it was not
so in reality. George the Third, it is said, once called the attention
of Mr. Ingalt, the manager of Windsor Home Park to a particular tree,
and said "I brought you here to point out this tree to you. I commit it
to your especial charge; and take care that no damage is ever done to
it. I had rather that every tree in the park should be cut down than
that this tree should be hurt. _This is Hernes Oak_."
Sir Philip Sidney's Oak at Penshurst mentioned by Ben Jonson--
That taller tree, of which the nut was set
At his great birth, where all the Muses met--
is still in existence. It is thirty feet in circumference. Waller also
alludes to
Yonder tree which stands the sacred mark
Of noble Sidney's birth.
Yardley Oak, immortalized by Cowper, is now in a state of decay.
Time made thee what thou wert--king of the woods!
And time hath made thee what thou art--a cave
For owls to roost in.
_Cowper_.
The tree is said to be at least fifteen hundred years old. It cannot
hold its present place much longer; but for many centuries to come it
will
Live in description and look green in song.
It stands on the grounds of the Marquis of Northampton; and to prevent
people from cutting off and carrying away pieces of it as relics, the
following notice has been painted on a board and nailed to the
tree:--"_Out of respect to the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of
Northampton is particularly desirous of preserving this Oak_."
Lord Byron, in early life, planted an oak in the garden at Newstead and
indulged the fancy, that as that flourished so should he. The oak has
survived the poet, but it will not outlive the memory of its planter or
even the boyish verses which he addressed to it.
Pope observes, that "a tree is a nobler object than a prince in his
coronation robes." Yet probably the poet had never seen any tree larger
than a British oak. What would he have thought of the Baobab tree in
Abyssinia, which measures from 80 to 120 feet in girth, and sometimes
reaches the age of five thousand years. We have no such sylvan patriarch
in Europe. The oldest British tree I have heard of, is a yew tree of
Fortingall in Scotland, of which the age is said to be two thousand five
hundred years. If trees had long memories and could converse with man,
what interesting chapters these survivors of centuries might add to the
history of the world!
Pope was not always happy in his Twickenham Paradise. His rural delights
were interrupted for a time by an unrequited passion for the beautiful
and highly-gifted but eccentric Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
Ah! friend, 'tis true--this truth you lovers know;
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow;
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens;
Joy lives not here, to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.
What are the gay parterre, the chequered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in to the passing winds?
So the struck deer, in some sequestered part,
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
He, stretched unseen, in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.
These are exquisite lines, and have given delight to innumerable
readers, but they gave no delight to Lady Mary. In writing to her
sister, the Countess of Mar, then at Paris, she says in allusion to
these "most musical, most melancholy" verses--"_I stifled them here; and
I beg they may die the same death at Paris_." It is not, however, quite
so easy a thing as Lady Mary seemed to think, to "stifle" such poetry as
Pope's.
Pope's notions respecting the laying out of gardens are well expressed
in the following extract from the fourth Epistle of his Moral
Essays.[015] This fourth Epistle was addressed, as most readers will
remember, to the accomplished Lord Burlington, who, as Walpole says,
"had every quality of a genius and an artist, except envy. Though his
own designs were more chaste and classic than Kent's, he entertained him
in his house till his death, and was more studious to extend his
friend's fame than his own."
Something there is more needful than expense,
And something previous e'en to taste--'tis sense;
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven,
And though no science fairly worth the seven;
A light, which in yourself you must perceive;
Jones and Le Notre have it not to give.
To build, or plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column or the arch to bend;
To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot;
In all let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over dress nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty every where be spied,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprizes, varies, and conceals the bounds.
_Consult the genius of the place in all_;[016]
That tells the waters or to rise or fall;
Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Still follow sense, of every art the soul;
Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start e'en from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at--perhaps a STOWE.[017]
Without it proud Versailles![018] Thy glory falls;
And Nero's terraces desert their walls.
The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make,
Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake;
Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain,
You'll wish your hill or sheltered seat again.
Pope is in most instances singularly happy in his compliments, but the
allusion to STOWE--as "_a work to wonder at_"--has rather an equivocal
appearance, and so also has the mention of Lord Cobham, the proprietor
of the place. In the first draught of the poem, the name of Bridgeman
was inserted where Cobham's now stands, but as Bridgeman mistook the
compliment for a sneer, the poet thought the landscape-gardener had
proved himself undeserving of the intended honor, and presented the
second-hand compliment to the peer. The grounds at Stowe, more praised
by poets than any other private estate in England, extend to 400 acres.
There are many other fine estates in our country of far greater extent,
but of less celebrity. Some of them are much too extensive, perhaps, for
true enjoyment. The Earl of Leicester, when he had completed his seat at
Holkham, observed, that "It was a melancholy thing to stand alone in
one's country. I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am
the Giant of Giant-castle and have ate up all my neighbours." The Earl
must have felt that the political economy of Goldsmith in his _Deserted
Village_ was not wholly the work of imagination.
Sweet smiling village! Loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen
And desolation saddens all the green,--
_One only master grasps thy whole domain_.
* * * * *
Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside,
To scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
"Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," as Lamb calls him, describes Stowe as a
Paradise.
ON LORD COBHAM'S GARDEN.
It puzzles much the sage's brains
Where Eden stood of yore,
Some place it in Arabia's plains,
Some say it is no more.
But Cobham can these tales confute,
As all the curious know;
For he hath proved beyond dispute,
That Paradise is STOWE.
Thomson also calls the place a paradise:
Ye Powers
That o'er the garden and the rural seat
Preside, which shining through the cheerful land
In countless numbers blest Britannia sees;
O, lead me to the wide-extended walks,
_The fair majestic paradise of Stowe!_
Not Persian Cyrus on Ionia's shore
E'er saw such sylvan scenes; such various art
By genius fired, such ardent genius tamed
By cool judicious art, that in the strife
All-beauteous Nature fears to be out-done.
The poet somewhat mars the effect of this compliment to the charms of
Stowe, by making it a matter of regret that the owner
His verdant files
Of ordered trees should here inglorious range,
Instead of squadrons flaming o'er the field,
And long embattled hosts.
This representation of rural pursuits as inglorious, a sentiment so out
of keeping with his subject, is soon after followed rather
inconsistently, by a sort of paraphrase of Virgil's celebrated picture
of rural felicity, and some of Thomson's own thoughts on the advantages
of a retreat from active life.
Oh, knew he but his happiness, of men
The happiest he! Who far from public rage
Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired
Drinks the pure pleasures of the rural life, &c.
Then again:--
Let others brave the flood in quest of gain
And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave.
_Let such as deem it glory to destroy,
Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek;
Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail,
The virgin's shriek and infant's trembling cry._
* * * * *
While he, from all the stormy passions free
That restless men involve, hears and _but_ hears,
At distance safe, the human tempest roar,
Wrapt close in conscious peace. The fall of kings,
The rage of nations, and the crush of states,
Move not the man, who from the world escaped,
In still retreats and flowery solitudes,
To nature's voice attends, from month to month,
And day to day, through the revolving year;
Admiring sees her in her every shape;
Feels all her sweet emotions at his heart;
Takes what she liberal gives, nor asks for more.
He, when young Spring, protudes the bursting gems
Marks the first bud, and sucks the healthful gale
Into his freshened soul; her genial hour
He full enjoys, and not a beauty blows
And not an opening blossom breathes in vain.
Thomson in his description of Lord Townshend's seat of Rainham--another
English estate once much celebrated and still much admired--exclaims:
Such are thy beauties, Rainham, such the haunts
Of angels, in primeval guiltless days
When man, imparadised, conversed with God.
And Broome after quoting the whole description in his dedication of his
own poems to Lord Townshend, observes, in the old fashioned fulsome
strain, "This, my lord, is but a faint picture of the place of your
retirement which no one ever enjoyed more elegantly."[019] "A faint
picture!" What more would the dedicator have wished Thomson to say?
Broome, if not contented with his patron's seat being described as an
earthly Paradise, must have desired it to be compared with Heaven
itself, and thus have left his Lordship no hope of the enjoyment of a
better place than he already possessed.
Samuel Boyse, who when without a shirt to his back sat up in his bed to
write verses, with his arms through two holes in his blanket, and when
he went into the streets wore paper collars to conceal the sad
deficiency of linen, has a poem of considerable length entitled _The
Triumphs of Nature_. It is wholly devoted to a description of this
magnificent garden,[020] in which, amongst other architectural
ornaments, was a temple dedicated to British worthies, where the busts
of Pope and Congreve held conspicuous places. I may as well give a
specimen of the lines of poor Boyse. Here is his description of that
part of Lord Cobham's grounds in which is erected to the Goddess of
Love, a Temple containing a statue of the Venus de Medicis.
Next to the fair ascent our steps we traced,
Where shines afar the bold rotunda placed;
The artful dome Ionic columns bear
Light as the fabric swells in ambient air.
Beneath enshrined the Tuscan Venus stands
And beauty's queen the beauteous scene commands:
The fond beholder sees with glad surprize,
Streams glisten, lawns appear, and forests rise--
Here through thick shades alternate buildings break,
There through the borders steals the silver lake,
A soft variety delights the soul,
And harmony resulting crowns the whole.
Congreve in his Letter in verse addressed to Lord Cobham asks him to
Tell how his pleasing Stowe employs his time.
It would seem that the proprietor of Stowe took particular interest in
the disposition of the water on his grounds. Congreve enquires
Or dost thou give the winds afar to blow
Each vexing thought, and heart-devouring woe,
And fix thy mind alone on rural scenes,
_To turn the level lawns to liquid plains_?
To raise the creeping rills from humble beds
And force the latent spring to lift their heads,
On watery columns, capitals to rear,
That mix their flowing curls with upper air?
* * * * *
Or slowly walk along the mazy wood
To meditate on all that's wise and good.
The line:--
To turn the level lawn to liquid plains--
Will remind the reader of Pope's
Lo! Cobham comes and floats them with a lake--
And it might be thought that Congreve had taken the hint from the bard
of Twickenham if Congreve's poem had not preceded that of Pope. The one
was published in 1729, the other in 1731.
Cowper is in the list of poets who have alluded to "Cobham's groves" and
Pope's commemoration of them.
And _Cobham's groves_ and Windsor's green retreats
When Pope describes them have a thousand sweets.
"Magnificence and splendour," says Mr. Whately, the author of
_Observations on Modern Gardening_, "are the characteristics of Stowe.
It is like one of those places celebrated in antiquity which were
devoted to the purposes of religion, and filled with sacred groves,
hallowed fountains, and temples dedicated to several deities; the resort
of distant nations and the object of veneration to half the heathen
world: the pomp is, at Stowe, blended with beauty; and the place is
equally distinguished by its amenity and grandeur." Horace Walpole
speaks of its "visionary enchantment." "I have been strolling about in
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, from garden to garden," says Pope in
one of his letters, "but still returning to Lord Cobham's with fresh
satisfaction."[021]
The grounds at Stowe, until the year 1714, were laid out in the old
formal style. Bridgeman then commenced the improvements and Kent
subsequently completed them.
Stowe is now, I believe, in the possession of the Marquis of Chandos,
son of the Duke of Buckingham. It is melancholy to state that the
library, the statues, the furniture, and even some of the timber on the
estate, were sold in 1848 to satisfy the creditors of the Duke.
Pope was never tired of improving his own grounds. "I pity you, Sir,"
said a friend to him, "because you have now completed every thing
belonging to your gardens."[022] "Why," replied Pope, "I really shall be
at a loss for the diversion I used to take in carrying out and finishing
things: I have now nothing left me to do but to add a little ornament or
two along the line of the Thames." I dare say Pope was by no means so
near the end of his improvements as he and his friend imagined. One
little change in a garden is sure to suggest or be followed by another.
Garden-improvements are "never ending, still beginning." The late Dr.
Arnold, the famous schoolmaster, writing to a friend, says--"The garden
is a constant source of amusement to us both (self and wife); there are
always some little alterations to be made, some few spots where an
additional shrub or two would be ornamental, something coming into
blossom; so that I can always delight to go round and see how things are
going on." A garden is indeed a scene of continual change. Nature, even
without the aid of the gardener, has "infinite variety," and supplies "a
perpetual feast of nectared sweets where no crude surfeit reigns."
Spence reports Pope to have said: "I have sometimes had an idea of
planting an old gothic cathedral in trees. Good large poplars, with
their white stems, cleared of boughs to a proper height would serve very
well for the columns, and might form the different aisles or
peristilliums, by their different distances and heights. These would
look very well near, and the dome rising all in a proper tuft in the
middle would look well at a distance." This sort of verdant architecture
would perhaps have a pleasing effect, but it is rather too much in the
artificial style, to be quite consistent with Pope's own idea of
landscape-gardening. And there are other trees that would form a nobler
natural cathedral than the formal poplar. Cowper did not think of the
poplar, when he described a green temple-roof.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems.
Almost the only traces of Pope's garden that now remain are the splendid
Spanish chesnut-trees and some elms and cedars planted by the poet
himself. A space once laid out in winding walks and beautiful
shrubberies is now a potatoe field! The present proprietor, Mr. Young,
is a wholesale tea-dealer. Even the bones of the poet, it is said, have
been disturbed. The skull of Pope, according to William Howitt, is now
in the private collection of a phrenologist! The manner in which it was
obtained, he says, is this:--On some occasion of alteration in the
church at Twickenham, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin
of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains. By
a bribe of L50 to the Sexton, possession of the skull was obtained for
one night; another skull was then returned instead of the poet's.
It has been stated that the French term _Ferme Ornee_ was first used in
England by Shenstone. It exactly expressed the character of his grounds.
Mr. Repton said that he never strolled over the scenery of the Leasowes
without lamenting the constant disappointment to which Shenstone exposed
himself by a vain attempt to unite the incompatible objects of ornament
and profit. "Thus," continued Mr. Repton, "the poet lived under the
continual mortification of disappointed hope, and with a mind
exquisitely sensible, he felt equally the sneer of the great man at the
magnificence of his attempt and the ridicule of the farmer at the
misapplication of his paternal acres." The "sneer of the great man." is
perhaps an allusion to what Dr. Johnson says of Lord Lyttelton:--that he
"looked with disdain" on "the petty State" of his neighbour. "For a
while," says Dr. Johnson, "the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell
their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself
admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice,
they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by
conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view,
and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception;
injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain." Mr. Graves, the
zealous friend of Shenstone, indignantly denies that any of the
Lyttelton family had evinced so ungenerous a feeling towards the
proprietor of the Leasowes who though his "empire" was less "spacious
and opulent" had probably a larger share of true taste than even the
proprietor of Hagley, the Lyttelton domain--though Hagley has been much,
and I doubt not, deservedly, admired.[023]
Dr. Johnson states that Shenstone's expenses were beyond his means,--
that he spent his estate in adorning it--that at last the clamours of
creditors "overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and that
his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and
fairies." But this is gross exaggeration. Shenstone was occasionally,
indeed, in slight pecuniary difficulties, but he could always have
protected himself from the intrusion of the myrmidons of the law by
raising money on his estate; for it appears that after the payment of
all his debts, he left legacies to his friends and annuities to his
servants.
Johnson himself is the most scornful of the critics upon Shenstone's
rural pursuits. "The pleasure of Shenstone," says the Doctor, "was all
in his eye: he valued what he valued merely for its looks. Nothing
raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his
water." Dr. Johnson would have seen no use in the loveliest piece of
running water in the world if it had contained nothing that he could
masticate! Mrs. Piozzi says of him, "The truth is, he hated to hear
about prospects and views, and laying out grounds and taste in
gardening." "That was the best garden," he said, "which produced most
roots and fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained
most fish." On this principle of the valuelessness of those pleasures
which enter the mind through the eye, Dr. Johnson should have blamed the
lovers of painting for dwelling with such fond admiration on the canvas
of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. In point of fact, Dr. Johnson had no
more sympathy with the genius of the painter or the musician than with
that of the Landscape gardener, for he had neither an eye nor an ear for
Art. He wondered how any man could be such a fool as to be moved to
tears by music, and observed, that, "one could not fill one's belly with
hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades." No; the loveliness
of nature does not satisfy the thirst and hunger of the body, but it
_does_ satisfy the thirst and hunger of the soul. No one can find
wheaten bread or wine or venison or beef or plum-pudding or turtle-soup
in mere sounds and sights, however exquisite--neither can any one find
such substantial diet within the boards of a book--no not even on the
pages of Shakespeare, or even those of the Bible itself,--but men can
find in sweet music and lovely scenery and good books something
infinitely more precious than all the wine, venison, beef, or
plum-pudding, or turtle-soup that could be swallowed during a long life by
the most craving and capacious alderman of London! Man is of a dual
nature: he is not all body. He has other and far higher wants and
enjoyments than the purely physical--and these nobler appetites are
gratified by the charms of nature and the creations of inspired genius.
Dr. Johnson's gastronomic allusions to nature recal the old story of a
poet pointing out to a utilitarian friend some white lambs frolicking in
a meadow. "Aye," said, the other, "only think of a quarter of one of
them with asparagus and mint sauce!" The story is by some supposed to
have had a Scottish origin, and a prosaic North Briton is made to say
that the pretty little lambs, sporting amidst the daisies and
buttercups, would "_mak braw pies_."
A profound feeling for the beautiful is generally held to be an
essential quality in the poet. It is a curious fact, however, that there
are some who aspire to the rank of poet, and have their claims allowed,
who yet cannot be said to be poetical in their nature--for how can that
nature be, strictly speaking, _poetical_ which denies the sentiment of
Keats, that
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever?
Both Scott and Byron very earnestly admired Dr. Johnson's "_London_" and
"_The Vanity of Human Wishes_." Yet the sentiments just quoted from the
author of those productions are far more characteristic of a utilitarian
philosopher than of one who has been endowed by nature with
The vision and the faculty divine,
and made capable, like some mysterious enchanter, of
Clothing the palpable and the familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.
Crabbe, also a prime favorite with the authors of the _Lay of the Last
Minstrel_, and _Childe Harold_, is recorded by his biographer--his own
son--to have exhibited "a remarkable indifference to all the proper
objects of taste;" to have had "no real love for painting, or music, or
architecture or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of
landscape." "In botany, grasses, the most _useful_ but the least
ornamental, were his favorites." "He never seemed to be captivated with
the mere beauty of natural objects or even to catch any taste for the
arrangement of his specimens. Within, the house was a kind of scientific
confusion; in the garden the usual showy foreigners gave place to the
most scarce flowers, especially to the rarer weeds, of Britain; and were
scattered here and there only for preservation. In fact he neither loved
order for its own sake nor had any very high opinion of that passion in
others."[024] Lord Byron described Crabbe to be
Though nature's sternest painter, yet _the best_.
What! was he a better painter of nature than Shakespeare? The truth is
that Byron was a wretched critic, though a powerful poet. His praises
and his censures were alike unmeasured.
His generous ardor no cold medium knew.
He seemed to recognize no great general principles of criticism, but to
found all his judgments on mere prejudice and passion. He thought Cowper
"no poet," pronounced Spenser "a dull fellow," and placed Pope above
Shakespeare. Byron's line on Crabbe is inscribed on the poet's tombstone
at Trowbridge. Perhaps some foreign visitor on reading the inscription
may be surprized at his own ignorance when he learns that it is not the
author of _Macbeth_ and _Othello_ that he is to regard as the best
painter of nature that England has produced, but the author of the
_Parish Register_ and the _Tales of the Hall_. Absurd and indiscriminate
laudations of this kind confound all intellectual distinctions and make
criticism ridiculous. Crabbe is unquestionably a vigorous and truthful
writer, but he is not the _best_ we have, in any sense of the word.
Though Dr. Johnson speaks so contemptuously of Shenstone's rural
pursuits, he could not help acknowledging that when the poet began "to
point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks and
to wind his waters," he did all this with such judgment and fancy as
"made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the
skilful; a place to be visited by travellers, and copied by designers."
Mason, in his _English Garden_, a poem once greatly admired, but now
rarely read, and never perhaps with much delight, does justice to the
taste of the Poet of the Leasowes.
Nor, Shenstone, thou
Shalt pass without thy meed, thou son of peace!
Who knew'st, perchance, to harmonize thy shades
Still softer than thy song; yet was that song
Nor rude nor inharmonious when attuned
To pastoral plaint, or tale of slighted love.
English pleasure-gardens have been much imitated by the French. Viscomte
Girardin, at his estate of Ermenonville, dedicated an inscription in
amusing French-English to the proprietor of the Leasowes--
THIS PLAIN STONE
TO WILLIAM SHENSTONE;
IN HIS WRITINGS HE DISPLAYED
A MIND NATURAL;
AT LEASOWES HE LAID
ARCADIAN GREENS RURAL.
The Viscomte, though his English composition was so quaint and
imperfect, was an elegant writer in his own language, and showed great
taste and skill in laying out his grounds. He had visited England, and
carefully studied our modern style of gardening. He had personally
consulted Shenstone, Mason, Whateley and other English authors on
subjects of rural taste. He published an eloquent description of his own
estate. His famous friend Rousseau wrote the preface to it. The book was
translated into English. Rousseau spent his last days at Ermenonville
and was buried there in what is called _The Isle of Poplars_. The garden
is now in a neglected state, but the tomb of Rousseau remains uninjured,
and is frequently visited by the admirers of his genius.
"Dr. Warton," says Bowles, "mentions Milton and Pope as the poets to
whom English Landscape is indebted, but _he forgot poor Shenstone_." A
later writer, however, whose sympathy for genius communicates such a
charm to all his anecdotes and comments in illustration of the literary
character, has devoted a chapter of his _Curiosities of Literature_ to a
notice of the rural tastes of the proprietor of the Leasowes. I must
give a brief extract from it.
"When we consider that Shenstone, in developing his fine pastoral ideas
in the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for
landscape-gardening, which has become the model of all Europe, this itself
constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity. Thus the private
pleasures of a man of genius may become at length those of a whole
people. The creator of this new taste appears to have received far less
notice than he merited. The name of Shenstone does not appear in the
Essay on Gardening, by Lord Orford; even the supercilious Gray only
bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his
friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson, incapacitated by
nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the
offices of the landscape designer, adds, that 'he will not inquire
whether they demand any great powers of mind.' Johnson, however, conveys
to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the
character of 'a sullen and surly speculator.' The anxious life of
Shenstone would indeed have been remunerated, could he have read the
enchanting eulogium of Whateley on the Leasowes; which, said he, 'is a
perfect picture of his mind--simple, elegant and amiable; and will
always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether
in the scenes which he formed, he only realised the pastoral images
which abound in his songs.' Yes! Shenstone had been delighted could he
have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his 'Chateau
Gothique, mais orne de bois charmans, don't j'ai pris l'idee en
Angleterre;' and Shenstone, even with his modest and timid nature, had
been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst memorials
dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and Gesner, raising in
his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in pure taste, to
Shenstone himself; for having displayed in his writings 'a mind
natural,' and in his Leasowes 'laid Arcadian greens rural;' and recently
Pindemonte has traced the taste of English gardening to Shenstone. A man
of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are placed out of the
prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of posterity!"
"The Leasowes," says William Howitt, "now belongs to the Atwood family;
and a Miss Atwood resides there occasionally. But the whole place bears
the impress of desertion and neglect. The house has a dull look; the
same heavy spirit broods over the lawns and glades: And it is only when
you survey it from a distance, as when approaching Hales-Owen from
Hagley, that the whole presents an aspect of unusual beauty."
Shenstone was at least as proud of his estate of the Leasowes as was
Pope of his Twickenham Villa--perhaps more so. By mere men of the world,
this pride in a garden may be regarded as a weakness, but if it be a
weakness it is at least an innocent and inoffensive one, and it has been
associated with the noblest intellectual endowments. Pitt and Fox and
Burke and Warren Hastings were not weak men, and yet were they all
extremely proud of their gardens. Every one, indeed, who takes an active
interest in the culture and embellishment of his garden, finds his pride
in it and his love for it increase daily. He is delighted to see it
flourish and improve beneath his care. Even the humble mechanic, in his
fondness for a garden, often indicates a feeling for the beautiful, and
a genial nature. If a rich man were openly to boast of his plate or his
equipages, or a literary man of his essays or his sonnets, as lovers of
flowers boast of their geraniums or dahlias or rhododendrons, they would
disgust the most indulgent hearer. But no one is shocked at the
exultation of a gardener, amateur or professional, when in the fulness
of his heart he descants upon the unrivalled beauty of his favorite
flowers:
'Plants of his hand, and children of his care.'
"I have made myself two gardens," says Petrarch, "and I do not imagine
that they are to be equalled in all the world. I should feel myself
inclined to be angry with fortune if there were any so beautiful out of
Italy." "I wish," says poor Kirke White writing to a friend, "I wish you
to have a taste of these (rural) pleasures with me, and if ever I should
live to be blessed with a quiet parsonage, and _another great object of
my ambition--a garden_, I have no doubt but we shall be for some short
intervals at least two quite contented bodies." The poet Young, in the
latter part of his life, after years of vain hopes and worldly
struggles, gave himself up almost entirely to the sweet seclusion of a
garden; and that peace and repose which cannot be found in courts and
political cabinets, he found at last
In sunny garden bowers
Where vernal winds each tree's low tones awaken,
And buds and bells with changes mark the hours.
He discovered that it was more profitable to solicit nature than to
flatter the great.
For Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.
People of a poetical temperament--all true lovers of nature--can afford,
far better than more essentially worldly beings, to exclaim with
Thomson.
I care not Fortune what you me deny,
You cannot bar me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face:
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns and living streams at eve:
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the _great children_ leave:--
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave.
The pride in a garden laid out under one's own directions and partly
cultivated by one's own hand has been alluded to as in some degree
unworthy of the dignity of manhood, not only by mere men of the world,
or silly coxcombs, but by people who should have known better. Even Sir
William Temple, though so enthusiastic about his fruit-trees, tells us
that he will not enter upon any account of _flowers_, having only
pleased himself with seeing or smelling them, and not troubled himself
with the care of them, which he observes "_is more the ladies part than
the men's_." Sir William makes some amends for this almost contemptuous
allusion to flowers in particular by his ardent appreciation of the use
of gardens and gardening in general. He thus speaks of their attractions
and advantages: "The sweetness of the air, the pleasantness of the
smell, the verdure of plants, the cleanness and lightness of food, the
exercise of working or walking, but above all, the exemption from cares
and solicitude, seem equally to favor and improve both contemplation and
health, the enjoyment of sense and imagination, and thereby the quiet
and ease of the body and mind." Again: "As gardening has been the
inclination of kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has been the
common favorite of public and private men, a pleasure of the greatest
and the care of the meanest; and indeed _an employment and a possession
for which no man is too high or too low_." This is just and liberal;
though I can hardly help still feeling a little sore at Sir William's
having implied in the passage previously quoted, that the care of
flowers is but a feminine occupation. As an elegant amusement, it is
surely equally well fitted for all lovers of the beautiful, without
reference to their sex.
It is not women and children only who delight in flower-gardens. Lord
Bacon and William Pitt and the Earl of Chatham and Fox and Burke and
Warren Hastings--all lovers of flowers--were assuredly not men of
frivolous minds or of feminine habits. They were always eager to exhibit
to visitors the beauty of their parterres. In his declining years the
stately John Kemble left the stage for his garden. That sturdy English
yeoman, William Cobbett, was almost as proud of his beds of flowers as
of the pages of his _Political Register_. He thus speaks of gardening:
"Gardening is a source of much greater profit than is generally
imagined; but, merely as an amusement or recreation it is a thing of
very great value. It is not only compatible with but favorable to the
study of any art or science; it is conducive to health by means of the
irresistible temptation which it offers to early rising; to the stirring
abroad upon one's legs, for a man may really ride till he cannot walk,
sit till he cannot stand, and lie abed till he cannot get up. It tends
to turn the minds of youth from amusements and attachments of a
frivolous and vicious nature, it is a taste which is indulged at home;
it tends to make home pleasant, and to endear to us the spot on which it
is our lot to live,--and as to the _expenses_ attending it, what are all
these expenses compared with those of the short, the unsatisfactory, the
injurious enjoyment of the card-table, and the rest of those amusements
which are sought from the town." _Cobbett's English Gardener_.
"Other fine arts," observes Lord Kames, "may be perverted to excite
irregular and even vicious emotions: but gardening, which inspires the
purest and most refined pleasures, cannot fail to promote every good
affection. The gaiety and harmony of mind it produceth, inclining the
spectator to communicate his satisfaction to others, and to make them
happy as he is himself, tend naturally to establish in him a habit of
humanity and benevolence."
Every thoughtful mind knows how much the face of nature has to do with
human happiness. In the open air and in the midst of summer-flowers, we
often feel the truth of the observation that "a fair day is a kind of
sensual pleasure, and of all others the most innocent." But it is also
something more, and better. It kindles a spiritual delight. At such a
time and in such a scene every observer capable of a religious emotion
is ready to exclaim--
Oh! there is joy and happiness in every thing I see,
Which bids my soul rise up and bless the God that blesses me
_Anon._
The amiable and pious Doctor Carey of Serampore, in whose grounds sprang
up that dear little English daisy so beautifully addressed by his
poetical proxy, James Montgomery of Sheffield, in the stanzas
commencing:--
Thrice welcome, little English flower!
My mother country's white and red--
was so much attached to his Indian garden, that it was always in his
heart in the intervals of more important cares. It is said that he
remembered it even upon his death-bed, and that it was amongst his last
injunctions to his friends that they should see to its being kept up
with care. He was particularly anxious that the hedges or railings
should always be in such good order as to protect his favorite shrubs
and flowers from the intrusion of Bengalee cattle.
A garden is a more interesting possession than a gallery of pictures or
a cabinet of curiosities. Its glories are never stationary or stale. It
has infinite variety. It is not the same to-day as it was yesterday. It
is always changing the character of its charms and always increasing
them in number. It delights all the senses. Its pleasures are not of an
unsocial character; for every visitor, high or low, learned or
illiterate, may be fascinated with the fragrance and beauty of a garden.
But shells and minerals and other curiosities are for the man of science
and the connoisseur. And a single inspection of them is generally
sufficient: they never change their aspect. The Picture-Gallery may
charm an instructed eye but the multitude have little relish for human
Art, because they rarely understand it:--while the skill of the Great
Limner of Nature is visible in every flower of the garden even to the
humblest swain.
It is pleasant to read how the wits and beauties of the time of Queen
Anne used to meet together in delightful garden-retreats, 'like the
companies in Boccaccio's Decameron or in one of Watteau's pictures.'
Ritchings Lodge, for instance, the seat of Lord Bathurst, was visited by
most of the celebrities of England, and frequently exhibited bright
groups of the polite and accomplished of both sexes; of men
distinguished for their heroism or their genius, and of women eminent
for their easy and elegant conversation, or for gaiety and grace of
manner, or perfect loveliness of face and form--all in harmonious union
with the charms of nature. The gardens at Ritchings were enriched with
Inscriptions from the pens of Congreve and Pope and Gay and Addison and
Prior. When the estate passed into the possession of the Earl of
Hertford, his literary lady devoted it to the Muses. "She invited every
summer," says Dr. Johnson, "some poet into the country to hear her
verses and assist her studies." Thomson, who praises her so lavishly in
his "Spring," offended her ladyship by allowing her too clearly to
perceive that he was resolved not to place himself in the dilemma of
which Pope speaks so feelingly with reference to other poetasters.
Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I,
Who can't be silent, and who will not lie.
I sit with sad civility, I read
With honest anguish and an aching head.
But though "the bard more fat than bard beseems" was restive under her
ladyship's "poetical operations," and too plainly exhibited a desire to
escape the infliction, preferring the Earl's claret to the lady's
rhymes, she should have been a little more generously forgiving towards
one who had already made her immortal. It is stated, that she never
repeated her invitation to the Poet of the Seasons, who though so
impatient of the sound of her tongue when it "rolled" her own
"raptures," seems to have been charmed with her _at a distance_--while
meditating upon her excellencies in the seclusion of his own study. The
compliment to the Countess is rather awkwardly wedged in between
descriptions of "gentle Spring" with her "shadowing roses" and "surly
Winter" with his "ruffian blasts." It should have commenced the poem.
O Hertford, fitted or to shine in courts
With unaffected grace, or walk the plain,
With innocence and meditation joined
In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
Which thy own season paints; when nature all
Is blooming and benevolent like thee.
Thomson had no objection to strike off a brief compliment in verse, but
he was too indolent to keep up _in propria persona_ an incessant fire of
compliments, like the _bon bons_ at a Carnival. It was easier to write
her praises than listen to her verses. Shenstone seems to have been more
pliable. He was personally obsequious, lent her recitations an attentive
ear, and was ever ready with the expected commendation. It is not likely
that her ladyship found much, difficulty in collecting around her a
crowd of critics more docile than Thomson and quite as complaisant as
Shenstone. Let but a _Countess_
Once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens, how the style refines!
Though Thomson's first want on his arrival in London from the North was
a pair of shoes, and he lived for a time in great indigence, he was
comfortable enough at last. Lord Lyttleton introduced him to the Prince
of Wales (who professed himself the patron of literature) and when his
Highness questioned him about the state of his affairs, Thomson assured
him that they "were in a more poetical posture than formerly." The
prince bestowed upon the poet a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and
when his friend Lord Lyttleton was in power his Lordship obtained for
him the office of Surveyor General of the Leeward Islands. He sent a
deputy there who was more trustworthy than Thomas Moore's at Bermuda.
Thomson's deputy after deducting his own salary remitted his principal
three hundred pounds per annum, so that the bard 'more fat than bard
beseems' was not in a condition to grow thinner, and could afford to
make his cottage a Castle of Indolence. Leigh Hunt has versified an
anecdote illustrative of Thomson's luxurious idleness. He who could
describe "_Indolence_" so well, and so often appeared in the part
himself,
Slippered, and with hands,
Each in a waistcoat pocket, (so that all
Might yet repose that could) was seen one morn
Eating a wondering peach from off the tree.
A little summer-house at Richmond which Thomson made his study is still
preserved, and even some articles of furniture, just as he left
them.[025] Over the entrance is erected a tablet on which is the
following inscription:
HERE
THOMSON SANG
THE SEASONS
AND THEIR CHANGE.
Thomson was buried in Richmond Church. Collins's lines to his memory,
beginning
In yonder grave a Druid lies,
are familiar to all readers of English poetry.
Richmond Hill has always been the delight not of poets only but of
painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds built a house there, and one of the only
three landscapes which seem to have survived him, is a view from the
window of his drawing-room. Gainsborough was also a resident in
Richmond. Richmond gardens laid out or rather altered by Brown, are now
united with those of Kew.
Savage resided for some time at Richmond. It was the favorite haunt of
Collins, one of the most poetical of poets, who, as Dr. Johnson says,
"delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the
magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian
gardens." Wordsworth composed a poem upon the Thames near Richmond in
remembrance of Collins. Here is a stanza of it.
Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames, that other bards may see
As lovely visions by thy side
As now fair river! come to me;
O glide, fair stream for ever so,
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
Till all our minds for ever flow
As thy deep waters now are flowing.
Thomson's description of the scenery of Richmond Hill perhaps hardly
does it justice, but the lines are too interesting to be omitted.
Say, shall we wind
Along the streams? or walk the smiling mead?
Or court the forest-glades? or wander wild
Among the waving harvests? or ascend,
While radiant Summer opens all its pride,
Thy hill, delightful Shene[026]? Here let us sweep
The boundless landscape now the raptur'd eye,
Exulting swift, to huge Augusta send,
Now to the sister hills[027] that skirt her plain,
To lofty Harrow now, and now to where
Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow
In lovely contrast to this glorious view
Calmly magnificent, then will we turn
To where the silver Thames first rural grows
There let the feasted eye unwearied stray,
Luxurious, there, rove through the pendent woods
That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat,
And stooping thence to Ham's embowering walks,
Beneath whose shades, in spotless peace retir'd,
With her the pleasing partner of his heart,
The worthy Queensbury yet laments his Gay,
And polish'd Cornbury woos the willing Muse
Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt
In Twit nam's bowers, and for their Pope implore
The healing god[028], to loyal Hampton's pile,
To Clermont's terrass'd height, and Esher's groves;
Where in the sweetest solitude, embrac'd
By the soft windings of the silent Mole,
From courts and senates Pelham finds repose
Enchanting vale! beyond whate'er the Muse
Has of Achaia or Hesperia sung!
O vale of bliss! O softly swelling hills!
On which the _Power of Cultivation_ lies,
And joys to see the wonders of his toil.
The Revd. Thomas Maurice wrote a poem entitled _Richmond Hill_, but it
contains nothing deserving of quotation after the above passage from
Thomson. In the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ the labors of
Maurice are compared to those of Sisyphus
So up thy hill, ambrosial Richmond, heaves
Dull Maurice, all his granite weight of leaves.
Towards the latter part of the last century the Empress of Russia
(Catherine the Second) expressed in a French letter to Voltaire her
admiration of the style of English Gardening.[029] "I love to
distraction," she writes, "the present English taste in gardening. Their
curved lines, their gentle slopes, their pieces of water in the shape of
lakes, their picturesque little islands. I have a great contempt for
straight lines and parallel walks. I hate those fountains which torture
water into forms unknown to nature. I have banished all the statues to
the vestibules and to the galleries. In a word English taste
predominates in my _plantomanie_."[030]
I omitted when alluding to those Englishmen in past times who
anticipated the taste of the present day in respect to laying out
grounds, to mention the ever respected name of John Evelyn, and as all
other writers before me, I believe, who have treated upon gardening,
have been guilty of the same oversight, I eagerly make his memory some
slight amends by quoting the following passage from one of his letters
to his friend Sir Thomas Browne.
"I might likewise hope to refine upon some particulars, especially
concerning the ornaments of gardens, which I shall endeavor so to handle
as that they may become useful and practicable, as well as magnificent,
and that persons of all conditions and faculties, which delight in
gardens, may therein encounter something for their owne advantage. The
modell, which I perceive you have seene, will aboundantly testifie my
abhorrency of those painted and formal projections of our cockney
gardens and plotts, which appeare like gardens of past-board and
marchpane, and smell more of paynt then of flowers and verdure; our
drift is a noble, princely, and universal Elysium, capable of all the
amoenities that can naturally be introduced into gardens of pleasure,
and such as may stand in competition with all the august designes and
stories of this nature, either of antient or moderne tymes; yet so as to
become useful and significant to the least pretences and faculties. We
will endeavour to shew how the air and genious of gardens operat upon
humane spirits towards virtue and sanctitie: I mean in a remote,
preparatory and instrumentall working. How caves, grotts, mounts, and
irregular ornaments of gardens do contribute to contemplative and
philosophicall enthusiasme; how _elysium, antrum, nemus, paradysus,
hortus, lucus_, &c., signifie all of them _rem sacram it divinam_; for
these expedients do influence the soule and spirits of men, and prepare
them for converse with good angells; besides which, they contribute to
the lesse abstracted pleasures, phylosophy naturall; and longevitie: and
I would have not onely the elogies and effigie of the antient and famous
garden heroes, but a society of the _paradisi cultores_ persons of
antient simplicity, Paradisean and Hortulan saints, to be a society of
learned and ingenuous men, such as Dr. Browne, by whome we might hope to
redeeme the tyme that has bin lost, in pursuing _Vulgar Errours_, and
still propagating them, as so many bold men do yet presume to do."
The English style of landscape-gardening being founded on natural
principles must be recognized by true taste in all countries. Even in
Rome, when art was most allowed to predominate over nature, there were
occasional instances of that correct feeling for rural beauty which the
English during the last century and a half have exhibited more
conspicuously than other nations. Atticus preferred Tully's villa at
Arpinum to all his other villas; because at Arpinum, Nature predominated
over art. Our Kents and Browns[031] never expressed a greater contempt,
than was expressed by Atticus, for all formal and artificial decorations
of natural scenery.
The spot where Cicero's villa stood, was, in the time of Middleton,
possessed by a convent of monks and was called the Villa of St. Dominic.
It was built, observes Mr. Dunlop, in the year 1030, from the fragments
of the Arpine Villa!
Art, glory, Freedom, fail--but Nature still is fair.
"Nothing," says Mr. Kelsall, "can be imagined finer than the surrounding
landscape. The deep azure of the sky, unvaried by a single cloud--Sora
on a rock at the foot of the precipitous Appennines--both banks of the
Garigliano covered with vineyards--the _fragor aquarum_, alluded to by
Atticus in his work _De Legibus_--the coolness, the rapidity and
ultramarine hue of the Fibrenus--the noise of its cataracts--the rich
turquoise color of the Liris--the minor Appennines round Arpino, crowned
with umbrageous oaks to the very summits--present scenery hardly
elsewhere to be equalled, certainly not to be surpassed, even in Italy."
This description of an Italian landscape can hardly fail to charm the
imagination of the coldest reader; but after all, I cannot help
confessing to so inveterate a partiality for dear old England as to be
delighted with the compliment which Gray, the poet, pays to English
scenery when he prefers it to the scenery of Italy. "Mr. Walpole,"
writes the poet from Italy, "says, our _memory_ sees more than our eyes
in this country. This is extremely true, since for _realities_ WINDSOR
or RICHMOND HILL is infinitely preferable to ALBANO or FRESCATI."
Sir Walter Scott, with all his patriotic love for his own romantic land,
could not withhold his tribute to the loveliness of Richmond Hill,--its
"_unrivalled landscape_" its "_sea of verdure_."
"They" (The Duke of Argyle and Jeanie Deans) "paused for a
moment on the brow of a hill, to gaze on the unrivalled
landscape it presented. A huge sea of verdure, with crossing and
intersecting promontories of massive and tufted groves was
tenanted by numberless flocks and herds which seemed to wander
unrestrained and unbounded through the rich pastures. The
Thames, here turreted with villas, and there garlanded with
forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the mighty monarch
of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but
accessaries, and bore on its bosom an hundred barks and skiffs
whose white sails and gaily fluttering pennons gave life to the
whole." _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_.
It must of course be admitted that there are grander, more sublime, more
varied and extensive prospects in other countries, but it would be
difficult to persuade me that the richness of English verdure could be
surpassed or even equalled, or that any part of the world can exhibit
landscapes more truly _lovely_ and _loveable_, than those of England, or
more calculated to leave a deep and enduring impression upon the heart.
Mr. Kelsall speaks of an Italian sky "_uncovered by a single cloud_,"
but every painter and poet knows how much variety and beauty of effect
are bestowed upon hill and plain and grove and river by passing clouds;
and even our over-hanging vapours remind us of the veil upon the cheek
of beauty; and ever as the sun uplifts the darkness the glory of the
landscape seems renewed and freshened. It would cheer the saddest heart
and send the blood dancing through the veins, to behold after a dull
misty dawn, the sun break out over Richmond Hill, and with one broad
light make the whole landscape smile; but I have been still more
interested in the prospect when on a cloudy day the whole "sea of
verdure" has been swayed to and fro into fresher life by the fitful
breeze, while the lights and shadows amidst the foliage and on the lawns
have been almost momentarily varied by the varying sky. These changes
fascinate the eye, keep the soul awake, and save the scenery from the
comparatively monotonous character of landscapes in less varying climes.
And for my own part, I cordially echo the sentiment of Wordsworth, who
when conversing with Mrs. Hemans about the scenery of the Lakes in the
North of England, observed: "I would not give up the mists that
_spiritualize_ our mountains for all the blue skies of Italy."
Though Mrs. Stowe, the American authoress already quoted as one of the
admirers of England, duly appreciates the natural grandeur of her own
land, she was struck with admiration and delight at the aspect of our
English landscapes. Our trees, she observes, "are of an order of
nobility and they wear their crowns right kingly." "Leaving out of
account," she adds, "our _mammoth arboria_, the English Parks have trees
as fine and effective as ours, and when I say their trees are of an
order of nobility, I mean that they (the English) pay a reverence to
them such as their magnificence deserves."
Walter Savage Landor, one of the most accomplished and most highly
endowed both by nature and by fortune of our living men of letters, has
done, or rather has tried to do, almost as much for his country in the
way of enriching its collection of noble trees as Evelyn himself. He
laid out L70,000 on the improvement of an estate in Monmouthshire, where
he planted and fenced half a million of trees, and had a million more
ready to plant, when the conduct of some of his tenants, who spitefully
uprooted them and destroyed the whole plantation, so disgusted him with
the place, that he razed to the ground the house which had cost him
L8,000, and left the country. He then purchased a beautiful estate in
Italy, which is still in possession of his family. He himself has long
since returned to his native land. Landor loves Italy, but he loves
England better. In one of his _Imaginary Conversations_ he tells an
Italian nobleman:
"The English are more zealous of introducing new fruits, shrubs and
plants, than other nations; you Italians are less so than any civilized
one. Better fruit is eaten in Scotland than in the most fertile and
cultivated parts of your peninsula. _As for flowers, there is a greater
variety in the worst of our fields than in the best of your gardens._ As
for shrubs, I have rarely seen a lilac, a laburnum, a mezereon, in any
of them, and yet they flourish before almost every cottage in our
poorest villages."
"We wonder in England, when we hear it related by travellers, that
peaches in Italy are left under the trees for swine; but, when we
ourselves come into the country, our wonder is rather that the swine do
not leave them for animals less nice."
Landor acknowledges that he has eaten better pears and cherries in Italy
than in England, but that all the other kinds of fruitage in Italy
appeared to him unfit for dessert.
The most celebrated of the private estates of the present day in England
is Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire. The mansion, called
the Palace of the Peak, is considered one of the most splendid
residences in the land. The grounds are truly beautiful and most
carefully attended to. The elaborate waterworks are perhaps not in the
severest taste. Some of them are but costly puerilities. There is a
water-work in the form of a tree that sends a shower from every branch
on the unwary visitor, and there are snakes that spit forth jets upon
him as he retires. This is silly trifling: but ill adapted to interest
those who have passed their teens; and not at all an agreeable sort of
hospitality in a climate like that of England. It is in the style of the
water-works at Versailles, where wooden soldiers shoot from their
muskets vollies of water at the spectators.[032]
It was an old English custom on certain occasions to sprinkle water over
the company at a grand entertainment. Bacon, in his Essay on Masques,
seems to object to getting drenched, when he observes that "some sweet
odours suddenly coming forth, _without any drops falling_, are in such
a company as there is steam and heat, things of great pleasure and
refreshment." It was a custom also of the ancient Greeks and Romans to
sprinkle their guests with fragrant waters. The Gascons had once the
same taste: "At times," says Montaigne, "from the bottom of the stage,
they caused sweet-scented waters to spout upwards and dart their thread
to such a prodigious height, as to sprinkle and perfume the vast
multitudes of spectators." The Native gentry of India always slightly
sprinkle their visitors with rose-water. It is flung from a small silver
utensil tapering off into a sort of upright spout with a pierced top in
the fashion of that part of a watering pot which English gardeners call
the _rose_.
The finest of the water-works at Chatsworth is one called the _Emperor
Fountain_ which throws up a jet 267 feet high. This height exceeds that
of any fountain in Europe. There is a vast Conservatory on the estate,
built of glass by Sir Joseph Paxton, who designed and constructed the
Crystal Palace. His experience in the building of conservatories no
doubt suggested to him the idea of the splendid glass edifice in Hyde
Park. The conservatory at Chatsworth required 70,000 square feet of
glass. Four miles of iron tubing are used in heating the building. There
is a broad carriage way running right through the centre of the
conservatory.[033] This conservatory is peculiarly rich in exotic plants
of all kinds, collected at an enormous cost. This most princely estate,
contrasted with the little cottages and cottage-gardens in the
neighbourhood, suggested to Wordsworth the following sonnet.
CHATSWORTH.
Chatsworth! thy stately mansion, and the pride
Of thy domain, strange contrast do present
To house and home in many a craggy tent
Of the wild Peak, where new born waters glide
Through fields whose thrifty occupants abide
As in a dear and chosen banishment
With every semblance of entire content;
So kind is simple Nature, fairly tried!
Yet he whose heart in childhood gave his troth
To pastoral dales, then set with modest farms,
May learn, if judgment strengthen with his growth,
That not for Fancy only, pomp hath charms;
And, strenuous to protect from lawless harms
The extremes of favored life, may honour both.
The two noblest of modern public gardens in England are those at
Kensington and Kew. Kensington Gardens were begun by King William the
III, but were originally only twenty-six acres in extent. Queen Anne
added thirty acres more. The grounds were laid out by the well-known
garden-designers, London and Wise.[034] Queen Caroline, who formed the
Serpentine River by connecting several detached pieces of water into
one, and set the example of a picturesque deviation from the straight
line,[035] added from Hyde Park no less than three hundred acres which
were laid out by Bridgeman. This was a great boon to the Londoners.
Horace Walpole says that Queen Caroline at first proposed to shut up St.
James's Park and convert it into a private garden for herself, but when
she asked Sir Robert Walpole what it would cost, he answered--"Only
three Crowns." This changed her intentions.
The reader of Pope will remember an allusion to the famous Ring in Hyde
Park. The fair Belinda was sometimes attended there by her guardian
Sylphs:
The light militia of the lower sky.
They guarded her from 'the white-gloved beaux,'
These though unseen are ever on the wing,
Hang o'er the box, _and hover o'er the Ring_.
It was here that the gallantries of the "Merry Monarch" were but too
often exhibited to his people. "After dinner," says the right garrulous
Pepys in his journal, "to Hyde Parke; at the Parke was the King, and in
another Coach, Lady Castlemaine, they greeting one another at every
turn."
The Gardens at Kew "Imperial Kew," as Darwin styles it, are the richest
in the world. They consist of one hundred and seventy acres. They were
once private gardens, and were long in the possession of Royalty, until
the accession of Queen Victoria, who opened the gardens to the public
and placed them under the control of the Commissioners of Her Majesty's
Woods and Forests, "with a view of rendering them available to the
general good."
She hath left you all her walks,
Her private arbors and new planted orchards
On this side Tiber. She hath left them you
And to your heirs for ever; common pleasures
To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.
They contain a large Palm-house built in 1848.[036] The extent of glass
for covering the building is said to be 360,000 square feet. My
Mahomedan readers in Hindostan, (I hope they will be numerous,) will
perhaps be pleased to hear that there is an ornamental mosque in these
gardens. On each of the doors of this mosque is an Arabic inscription in
golden characters, taken from the Koran. The Arabic has been thus
translated:--
LET THERE BE NO FORCE IN RELIGION.
THERE IS NO OTHER GOD EXCEPT THE DEITY.
MAKE NOT ANY LIKENESS UNTO GOD.
The first sentence of the translation is rather ambiguously worded. The
sentiment has even an impious air: an apparent meaning very different
from that which was intended. Of course the original text _means_,
though the English translator has not expressed that meaning--"Let there
be no force _used_ in religion."
When William Cobbett was a boy of eleven years of age he worked in the
garden of the Bishop of Winchester at Farnham. Having heard much of Kew
gardens he resolved to change his locality and his master. He started
off for Kew, a distance of about thirty miles, with only thirteen pence
in his pocket. The head gardener at Kew at once engaged his services. A
few days after, George the Fourth, then Prince of Wales, saw the boy
sweeping the lawns, and laughed heartily at his blue smock frock and
long red knotted garters. But the poor gardener's boy became a public
writer, whose productions were not exactly calculated to excite the
merriment of princes.
Most poets have a painter's eye for the disposition of forms and
colours. Kent's practice as a painter no doubt helped to make him what
he was as a landscape-gardener. When an architect was consulted about
laying out the grounds at Blenheim he replied, "you must send for a
landscape-painter:" he might have added--"_or a poet_."
Our late Laureate, William Wordsworth, exhibited great taste in his
small garden at Rydal Mount. He said of himself--very truly though not
very modestly perhaps,--but modesty was never Wordsworth's
weakness--that nature seemed to have fitted him for three callings--that
of the poet, the critic on works of art, and the landscape-gardener.
The poet's nest--(Mrs. Hemans calls it 'a lovely cottage-like
building'[037])--is almost hidden in a rich profusion of roses and ivy
and jessamine and virginia-creeper. Wordsworth, though he passionately
admired the shapes and hues of flowers, knew nothing of their fragrance.
In this respect knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out. He had
possessed at no time of his life the sense of smell. To make up for this
deficiency, he is said (by De Quincey) to have had "a peculiar depth of
organic sensibility of form and color."
Mr. Justice Coleridge tells us that Wordsworth dealt with
shrubs, flower-beds and lawns with the readiness of a practised
landscape-gardener, and that it was curious to observe how he had imparted
a portion of his taste to his servant, James Dixon. In fact, honest James
regarded himself as a sort of Arbiter Elegantiarum. The master and his
servant often discussed together a question of taste. Wordsworth
communicated to Mr. Justice Coleridge how "he and James" were once "in a
puzzle" about certain discolored spots upon the lawn. "Cover them with
soap-lees," said the master. "That will make the green there darker than
the rest," said the gardener. "Then we must cover the whole." "That will
not do," objects the gardener, "with reference to the little lawn to
which you pass from this." "Cover that," said the poet. "You will then,"
replied the gardener, "have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage
surrounding it."
Pope too had communicated to his gardener at Twickenham something of his
own taste. The man, long after his master's death, in reference to the
training of the branches of plants, used to talk of their being made to
hang "_something poetical_".
It would have grieved Shakespeare and Pope and Shenstone had they
anticipated the neglect or destruction of their beloved retreats.
Wordsworth said, "I often ask myself what will become of Rydal Mount
after our day. Will the old walls and steps remain in front of the house
and about the grounds, or will they be swept away with all the beautiful
mosses and ferns and wild geraniums and other flowers which their rude
construction suffered and encouraged to grow among them. This little
wild flower, _Poor Robin_, is here constantly courting my attention and
exciting what may be called a domestic interest in the varying aspect of
its stalks and leaves and flowers." I hope no Englishman meditating to
reside on the grounds now sacred to the memory of a national poet will
ever forget these words of the poet or treat his cottage and garden at
Rydal Mount as some of Pope's countrymen have treated the house and
grounds at Twickenham.[038] It would be sad indeed to hear, after this,
that any one had refused to spare the _Poor Robins_ and _wild geraniums_
of Rydal Mount. Miss Jewsbury has a poem descriptive of "the Poet's
Home." I must give the first stanza:--
WORDSWORTH'S COTTAGE.
Low and white, yet scarcely seen
Are its walls of mantling green;
Not a window lets in light
But through flowers clustering bright,
Not a glance may wander there
But it falls on something fair;
Garden choice and fairy mound
Only that no elves are found;
Winding walk and sheltered nook
For student grave and graver book,
Or a bird-like bower perchance
Fit for maiden and romance.
Another lady-poet has poured forth in verse her admiration of
THE RESIDENCE OF WORDSWORTH.
Not for the glory on their heads
Those stately hill-tops wear,
Although the summer sunset sheds
Its constant crimson there:
Not for the gleaming lights that break
The purple of the twilight lake,
Half dusky and half fair,
Does that sweet valley seem to be
A sacred place on earth to me.
The influence of a moral spell
Is found around the scene,
Giving new shadows to the dell,
New verdure to the green.
With every mountain-top is wrought
The presence of associate thought,
A music that has been;
Calling that loveliness to life,
With which the inward world is rife.
His home--our English poet's home--
Amid these hills is made;
Here, with the morning, hath he come,
There, with the night delayed.
On all things is his memory cast,
For every place wherein he past,
Is with his mind arrayed,
That, wandering in a summer hour,
Asked wisdom of the leaf and flower.
L.E.L.
The cottage and garden of the poet are not only picturesque and
delightful in themselves, but from their position in the midst of some
of the finest scenery of England. One of the writers in the book
entitled '_The Land we Live in_' observes that the bard of the mountains
and the lakes could not have found a more fitting habitation had the
whole land been before him, where to choose his place of rest. "Snugly
sheltered by the mountains, embowered among trees, and having in itself
prospects of surpassing beauty, it also lies in the midst of the very
noblest objects in the district, and in one of the happiest social
positions. The grounds are delightful in every respect; but one
view--that from the terrace of moss-like grass--is, to our thinking, the
most exquisitely graceful in all this land of beauty. It embraces the
whole valley of Windermere, with hills on either side softened into
perfect loveliness."
Eustace, the Italian tourist, seems inclined to deprive the English of
the honor of being the first cultivators of the natural style in
gardening, and thinks that it was borrowed not from Milton but from
Tasso. I suppose that most genuine poets, in all ages and in all
countries, when they give full play to the imagination, have glimpses of
the truly natural in the arts. The reader will probably be glad to renew
his acquaintance with Tasso's description of the garden of Armida. I
shall give the good old version of Edward Fairfax from the edition of
1687. Fairfax was a true poet and wrote musically at a time when
sweetness of versification was not so much aimed at as in a later day.
Waller confessed that he owed the smoothness of his verse to the example
of Fairfax, who, as Warton observes, "well vowelled his lines."
THE GARDEN OF ARMIDA.
When they had passed all those troubled ways,
The Garden sweet spread forth her green to shew;
The moving crystal from the fountains plays;
Fair trees, high plants, strange herbs and flowerets new,
Sunshiny hills, vales hid from Phoebus' rays,
Groves, arbours, mossie caves at once they view,
And that which beauty most, most wonder brought,
No where appear'd the Art which all this wrought.
So with the rude the polished mingled was,
That natural seem'd all and every part,
Nature would craft in counterfeiting pass,
And imitate her imitator Art:
Mild was the air, the skies were clear as glass,
The trees no whirlwind felt, nor tempest's smart,
But ere the fruit drop off, the blossom comes,
This springs, that falls, that ripeneth and this blooms.
The leaves upon the self-same bough did hide,
Beside the young, the old and ripened fig,
Here fruit was green, there ripe with vermeil side;
The apples new and old grew on one twig,
The fruitful vine her arms spread high and wide,
That bended underneath their clusters big;
The grapes were tender here, hard, young and sour,
There purple ripe, and nectar sweet forth pour.
The joyous birds, hid under green-wood shade,
Sung merry notes on every branch and bow,
The wind that in the leaves and waters plaid
With murmer sweet, now sung and whistled now;
Ceased the birds, the wind loud answer made:
And while they sung, it rumbled soft and low;
Thus were it hap or cunning, chance or art,
The wind in this strange musick bore his part.
With party-coloured plumes and purple bill,
A wondrous bird among the rest there flew,
That in plain speech sung love-lays loud and shrill,
Her leden was like humane language true;
So much she talkt, and with such wit and skill,
That strange it seemed how much good she knew;
Her feathered fellows all stood hush to hear,
Dumb was the wind, the waters silent were.
The gently budding rose (quoth she) behold,
That first scant peeping forth with virgin beams,
Half ope, half shut, her beauties doth upfold
In their dear leaves, and less seen, fairer seems,
And after spreads them forth more broad and bold,
Then languisheth and dies in last extreams,
Nor seems the same, that decked bed and bower
Of many a lady late, and paramour.
So, in the passing of a day, doth pass
The bud and blossom of the life of man,
Nor ere doth flourish more, but like the grass
Cut down, becometh wither'd, pale and wan:
O gather then the rose while time thou hast,
Short is the day, done when it scant began;
Gather the rose of love, while yet thou may'st
Loving be lov'd; embracing, be embrac'd.
He ceas'd, and as approving all he spoke,
The quire of birds their heav'nly tunes renew,
The turtles sigh'd, and sighs with kisses broke,
The fowls to shades unseen, by pairs withdrew;
It seem'd the laurel chaste, and stubborn oak,
And all the gentle trees on earth that grew,
It seem'd the land, the sea, and heav'n above,
All breath'd out fancy sweet, and sigh'd out love.
_Godfrey of Bulloigne_
I must place near the garden of Armida, Ariosto's garden of Alcina.
"Ariosto," says Leigh Hunt, "cared for none of the pleasures of the
great, except building, and was content in Cowley's fashion, with "a
small house in a large garden." He loved gardening better than he
understood it, was always shifting his plants, and destroying the seeds,
out of impatience to see them germinate. He was rejoicing once on the
coming up of some "capers" which he had been visiting every day, to see
how they got on, when it turned out that his capers were elder trees!"
THE GARDEN OF ALCINA.
'A more delightful place, wherever hurled,
Through the whole air, Rogero had not found;
And had he ranged the universal world,
Would not have seen a lovelier in his round,
Than that, where, wheeling wide, the courser furled
His spreading wings, and lighted on the ground
Mid cultivated plain, delicious hill,
Moist meadow, shady bank, and crystal rill;
'Small thickets, with the scented laurel gay,
Cedar, and orange, full of fruit and flower,
Myrtle and palm, with interwoven spray,
Pleached in mixed modes, all lovely, form a bower;
And, breaking with their shade the scorching ray,
Make a cool shelter from the noon-tide hour.
And nightingales among those branches wing
Their flight, and safely amorous descants sing.
'Amid red roses and white lilies _there_,
Which the soft breezes freshen as they fly,
Secure the cony haunts, and timid hare,
And stag, with branching forehead broad and high.
These, fearless of the hunter's dart or snare,
Feed at their ease, or ruminating lie;
While, swarming in those wilds, from tuft or steep,
Dun deer or nimble goat disporting leap.'
_Rose's Orlando Furioso_.
Spenser's description of the garden of Adonis is too long to give
entire, but I shall quote a few stanzas. The old story on which Spenser
founds his description is told with many variations of circumstance and
meaning; but we need not quit the pages of the Faerie Queene to lose
ourselves amidst obscure mythologies. We have too much of these indeed
even in Spenser's own version of the fable.
THE GARDEN OF ADONIS.
Great enimy to it, and all the rest
That in the Gardin of Adonis springs,
Is wicked Time; who with his scythe addrest
Does mow the flowring herbes and goodly things,
And all their glory to the ground downe flings,
Where they do wither and are fowly mard
He flyes about, and with his flaggy wings
Beates downe both leaves and buds without regard,
Ne ever pitty may relent his malice hard.
* * * * *
But were it not that Time their troubler is,
All that in this delightful gardin growes
Should happy bee, and have immortall blis:
For here all plenty and all pleasure flowes;
And sweete Love gentle fitts emongst them throwes,
Without fell rancor or fond gealosy.
Franckly each paramour his leman knowes,
Each bird his mate; ne any does envy
Their goodly meriment and gay felicity.
There is continual spring, and harvest there
Continuall, both meeting at one tyme:
For both the boughes doe laughing blossoms beare.
And with fresh colours decke the wanton pryme,
And eke attonce the heavy trees they clyme,
Which seeme to labour under their fruites lode:
The whiles the ioyous birdes make their pastyme
Emongst the shady leaves, their sweet abode,
And their trew loves without suspition tell abrode.
Right in the middest of that Paradise
There stood a stately mount, on whose round top
A gloomy grove of mirtle trees did rise,
Whose shady boughes sharp steele did never lop,
Nor wicked beastes their tender buds did crop,
But like a girlond compassed the hight,
And from their fruitfull sydes sweet gum did drop,
That all the ground, with pretious deaw bedight,
Threw forth most dainty odours and most sweet delight.
And in the thickest covert of that shade
There was a pleasaunt arber, not by art
But of the trees owne inclination made,
Which knitting their rancke braunches part to part,
With wanton yvie-twine entrayld athwart,
And eglantine and caprifole emong,
Fashioned above within their inmost part,
That neither Phoebus beams could through them throng,
Nor Aeolus sharp blast could worke them any wrong.
And all about grew every sort of flowre,
To which sad lovers were transformde of yore,
Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramoure
And dearest love;
Foolish Narcisse, that likes the watry shore;
Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late,
Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore
Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate,
To whom sweet poet's verse hath given endlesse date.
_Fairie Queene, Book III. Canto VI_.
I must here give a few stanzas from Spenser's description of the _Bower
of Bliss_
In which whatever in this worldly state
Is sweet and pleasing unto living sense,
Or that may dayntiest fantasy aggrate
Was poured forth with pleantiful dispence.
The English poet in his Fairie Queene has borrowed a great deal from
Tasso and Ariosto, but generally speaking, his borrowings, like those of
most true poets, are improvements upon the original.
THE BOWER OF BLISS.
There the most daintie paradise on ground
Itself doth offer to his sober eye,
In which all pleasures plenteously abownd,
And none does others happinesse envye;
The painted flowres; the trees upshooting hye;
The dales for shade; the hilles for breathing-space;
The trembling groves; the christall running by;
And that which all faire workes doth most aggrace,
The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place.
One would have thought, (so cunningly the rude[039]
And scorned partes were mingled with the fine,)
That Nature had for wantonesse ensude
Art, and that Art at Nature did repine;
So striving each th' other to undermine,
Each did the others worke more beautify;
So diff'ring both in willes agreed in fine;
So all agreed, through sweete diversity,
This Gardin to adorn with all variety.
And in the midst of all a fountaine stood,
Of richest substance that on earth might bee,
So pure and shiny that the silver flood
Through every channel running one might see;
Most goodly it with curious ymageree
Was over-wrought, and shapes of naked boyes,
Of which some seemed with lively iollitee
To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,
Whylest others did themselves embay in liquid ioyes.
* * * * *
Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
Of all that mote delight a daintie eare,
Such as attonce might not on living ground,
Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere:
Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee;
For all that pleasing is to living eare
Was there consorted in one harmonee;
Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters all agree:
The ioyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet;
Th' angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmure of the waters fall;
The waters fall with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.
_The Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto XII._
Every school-boy has heard of the gardens of the Hesperides. The story
is told in many different ways. According to some accounts, the
Hesperides, the daughters of Hesperus, were appointed to keep charge of
the tree of golden apples which Jupiter presented to Juno on their
wedding day. A hundred-headed dragon that never slept, (the offspring of
Typhon,) couched at the foot of the tree. It was one of the twelve
labors of Hercules to obtain possession of some of these apples. He slew
the dragon and gathered three golden apples. The gardens, according to
some authorities, were situated near Mount Atlas.
Shakespeare seems to have taken _Hesperides_ to be the name of the
garden instead of that of its fair keepers. Even the learned Milton in
his _Paradise Regained_, (Book II) talks of _the ladies of the
Hesperides_, and appears to make the word Hesperides synonymous with
"Hesperian gardens." Bishop Newton, in a foot-note to the passage in
"Paradise Regained," asks, "What are the Hesperides famous for, but the
gardens and orchards which _they had_ bearing golden fruit in the
western Isles of Africa." Perhaps after all there may be some good
authority in favor of extending the names of the nymphs to the garden
itself. Malone, while condemning Shakespeare's use of the words as
inaccurate, acknowledges that other poets have used it in the same way,
and quotes as an instance, the following lines from Robert Greene:--
Shew thee the tree, leaved with refined gold,
Whereon the fearful dragon held his seat,
That watched _the garden_ called the _Hesperides_.
_Robert Greene_.
For valour is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
_Love's Labour Lost_.
Before thee stands this fair Hesperides,
With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched
For death-like dragons here affright thee hard.
_Pericles, Prince of Tyre_.
Milton, after the fourth line of his Comus, had originally inserted, in
his manuscript draft of the poem, the following description of the
garden of the Hesperides.
THE GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES
Amid the Hesperian gardens, on whose banks
Bedewed with nectar and celestial songs
Eternal roses grow, and hyacinth,
And fruits of golden rind, on whose fair tree
The scaly harnessed dragon ever keeps
His uninchanted eye, around the verge
And sacred limits of this blissful Isle
The jealous ocean that old river winds
His far extended aims, till with steep fall
Half his waste flood the wide Atlantic fills;
And half the slow unfathomed Stygian pool
But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder
With distant worlds and strange removed climes
Yet thence I come and oft from thence behold
The smoke and stir of this dim narrow spot
Milton subsequently drew his pen through these lines, for what reason is
not known. Bishop Newton observes, that this passage, saved from
intended destruction, may serve as a specimen of the truth of the
observation that
Poets lose half the praise they should have got
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
_Waller_.
As I have quoted in an earlier page some unfavorable allusions to
Homer's description of a Grecian garden, it will be but fair to follow
up Milton's picture of Paradise, and Tasso's garden of Armida, and
Ariosto's Garden of Alcina, and Spenser's Garden of Adonis and his Bower
of Bliss, with Homer's description of the Garden of Alcinous. Minerva
tells Ulysses that the Royal mansion to which the garden of Alcinous is
attached is of such conspicuous grandeur and so generally known, that
any child might lead him to it;
For Phoeacia's sons
Possess not houses equalling in aught
The mansion of Alcinous, the king.
I shall give Cowper's version, because it may be less familiar to the
reader than Pope's, which is in every one's hand.
THE GARDEN OF ALCINOUS
Without the court, and to the gates adjoined
A spacious garden lay, fenced all around,
Secure, four acres measuring complete,
There grew luxuriant many a lofty tree,
Pomgranate, pear, the apple blushing bright,
The honeyed fig, and unctuous olive smooth.
Those fruits, nor winter's cold nor summer's heat
Fear ever, fail not, wither not, but hang
Perennial, while unceasing zephyr breathes
Gently on all, enlarging these, and those
Maturing genial; in an endless course.
Pears after pears to full dimensions swell,
Figs follow figs, grapes clustering grow again
Where clusters grew, and (every apple stripped)
The boughs soon tempt the gatherer as before.
There too, well rooted, and of fruit profuse,
His vineyard grows; part, wide extended, basks
In the sun's beams; the arid level glows;
In part they gather, and in part they tread
The wine-press, while, before the eye, the grapes
Here put their blossoms forth, there gather fast
Their blackness. On the garden's verge extreme
Flowers of all hues[040] smile all the year, arranged
With neatest art judicious, and amid
The lovely scene two fountains welling forth,
One visits, into every part diffused,
The garden-ground, the other soft beneath
The threshold steals into the palace court
Whence every citizen his vase supplies.
_Homer's Odyssey, Book VII_.
The mode of watering the garden-ground, and the use made of the water by
the public--
Whence every citizen his vase supplies--
can hardly fail to remind Indian and Anglo-Indian readers of a Hindu
gentleman's garden in Bengal.
Pope first published in the _Guardian_ his own version of the account of
the garden of Alcinous and subsequently gave it a place in his entire
translation of Homer. In introducing the readers of the _Guardian_ to
the garden of Alcinous he observes that "the two most celebrated wits of
the world have each left us a particular picture of a garden; wherein
those great masters, being wholly unconfined and pointing at pleasure,
may be thought to have given a full idea of what seemed most excellent
in that way. These (one may observe) consist entirely of the useful part
of horticulture, fruit trees, herbs, waters, &c. The pieces I am
speaking of are Virgil's account of the garden of the old Corycian, and
Homer's of that of Alcinous. The first of these is already known to the
English reader, by the excellent versions of Mr. Dryden and Mr.
Addison."
I do not think our present landscape-gardeners, or parterre-gardeners or
even our fruit or kitchen-gardeners can be much enchanted with Virgil's
ideal of a garden, but here it is, as "done into English," by John
Dryden, who describes the Roman Poet as "a profound naturalist," and "_a
curious Florist_."
THE GARDEN OF THE OLD CORYCIAN.
I chanc'd an old Corycian swain to know,
Lord of few acres, and those barren too,
Unfit for sheep or vines, and more unfit to sow:
Yet, lab'ring well his little spot of ground,
Some scatt'ring pot-herbs here and there he found,
Which, cultivated with his daily care
And bruis'd with vervain, were his frugal fare.
With wholesome poppy-flow'rs, to mend his homely board:
For, late returning home, he supp'd at ease,
And wisely deem'd the wealth of monarchs less:
The little of his own, because his own, did please.
To quit his care, he gather'd, first of all,
In spring the roses, apples in the fall:
And, when cold winter split the rocks in twain,
And ice the running rivers did restrain,
He stripp'd the bear's foot of its leafy growth,
And, calling western winds, accus'd the spring of sloth
He therefore first among the swains was found
To reap the product of his labour'd ground,
And squeeze the combs with golden liquor crown'd
His limes were first in flow'rs, his lofty pines,
With friendly shade, secur'd his tender vines.
For ev'ry bloom his trees in spring afford,
An autumn apple was by tale restor'd
He knew to rank his elms in even rows,
For fruit the grafted pear tree to dispose,
And tame to plums the sourness of the sloes
With spreading planes he made a cool retreat,
To shade good fellows from the summer's heat
_Virgil's Georgics, Book IV_.
An excellent Scottish poet--Allan Ramsay--a true and unaffected
describer of rural life and scenery--seems to have had as great a
dislike to topiary gardens, and quite as earnest a love of nature, as
any of the best Italian poets. The author of the "Gentle Shepherd" tells
us in the following lines what sort of garden most pleased his fancy.
ALLAN RAMSAY'S GARDEN.
I love the garden wild and wide,
Where oaks have plum-trees by their side,
Where woodbines and the twisting vine
Clip round the pear tree and the pine
Where mixed jonquils and gowans grow
And roses midst rank clover grow
Upon a bank of a clear strand,
In wrimplings made by Nature's hand
Though docks and brambles here and there
May sometimes cheat the gardener's care,
_Yet this to me is Paradise_,
_Compared with prim cut plots and nice_,
_Where Nature has to Act resigned,_
_Till all looks mean, stiff and confined_.
I cannot say that I should wish to see forest trees and docks and
brambles in garden borders. Honest Allan here runs a little into the
extreme, as men are apt enough to do, when they try to get as far as
possible from the side advocated by an opposite party.
I shall now exhibit two paintings of bowers. I begin with one from
Spenser.
A BOWER
And over him Art stryving to compayre
With Nature did an arber greene dispied[041]
Framed of wanton yvie, flouring, fayre,
Through which the fragrant eglantine did spred
His prickling armes, entrayld with roses red,
Which daintie odours round about them threw
And all within with flowers was garnished
That, when myld Zephyrus emongst them blew,
Did breathe out bounteous smels, and painted colors shew
And fast beside these trickled softly downe
A gentle streame, whose murmuring wave did play
Emongst the pumy stones, and made a sowne,
To lull him soft asleepe that by it lay
The wearie traveiler wandring that way,
Therein did often quench his thirsty head
And then by it his wearie limbes display,
(Whiles creeping slomber made him to forget
His former payne,) and wypt away his toilsom sweat.
And on the other syde a pleasaunt grove
Was shott up high, full of the stately tree
That dedicated is t'Olympick Iove,
And to his son Alcides,[042] whenas hee
In Nemus gayned goodly victoree
Theirin the merry birds of every sorte
Chaunted alowd their cheerful harmonee,
And made emongst themselves a sweete consort
That quickned the dull spright with musicall comfort.
_Fairie Queene, Book 2 Cant. 5 Stanzas 29, 30 and 31._
Here is a sweet picture of a "shady lodge" from the hand of Milton.
EVE'S NUPTIAL BOWER.
Thus talking, hand in hand alone they pass'd
On to their blissful bower. It was a place
Chosen by the sov'reign Planter, when he framed
All things to man's delightful use, the roof
Of thickest covert was inwoven shade,
Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew
Of firm and fragrant leaf, on either side
Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub,
Fenced up the verdant wall, each beauteous flower
Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine,
Rear'd high their flourish'd heads between, and wrought
Mosaic, under foot the violet,
Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay
Broider'd the ground, more colour'd than with stone
Of costliest emblem other creature here,
Beast, bird, insect, or worm, durst enter none,
Such was their awe of man. In shadier bower
More sacred and sequester'd, though but feign'd,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted. Here, in close recess,
With flowers, garlands, and sweet smelling herbs,
Espoused Eve deck'd first her nuptial bed,
And heavenly quires the hymenean sung
I have already quoted from Leigh Hunt's "Stories from the Italian poets"
an amusing anecdote illustrative of Ariosto's ignorance of botany. But
even in these days when all sorts of sciences are forced upon all sorts
of students, we often meet with persons of considerable sagacity and
much information of a different kind who are marvellously ignorant of
the vegetable world.
In the just published Memoirs of the late James Montgomery, of
Sheffield, it is recorded that the poet and his brother Robert, a
tradesman at Woolwich, (not Robert Montgomery, the author of 'Satan,'
&c.) were one day walking together, when the trader seeing a field of
flax in full flower, asked the poet what sort of corn it was. "Such corn
as your shirt is made of," was the reply. "But Robert," observes a
writer in the _Athenaeum_, "need not be ashamed of his simplicity.
Rousseau, naturalist as he was, could hardly tell one berry from
another, and three of our greatest wits disputing in the field whether
the crop growing there was rye, barley, or oats, were set right by a
clown, who truly pronounced it wheat."
Men of genius who have concentrated all their powers on some one
favorite profession or pursuit are often thus triumphed over by the
vulgar, whose eyes are more observant of the familiar objects and
details of daily life and of the scenes around them. Wordsworth and
Coleridge, on one occasion, after a long drive, and in the absence of a
groom, endeavored to relieve the tired horse of its harness. After
torturing the poor animal's neck and endangering its eyes by their
clumsy and vain attempts to slip off the collar, they at last gave up
the matter in despair. They felt convinced that the horse's head must
have swollen since the collar was put on. At last a servant-girl beheld
their perplexity. "La, masters," she exclaimed, "you dont set about it
the right way." She then seized hold of the collar, turned it broad end
up, and slipped it off in a second. The mystery that had puzzled two of
the finest intellects of their time was a very simple matter indeed to a
country wench who had perhaps never heard that England possessed a
Shakespeare.
James Montgomery was a great lover of flowers, and few of our English
poets have written about the family of Flora, the sweet wife of Zephyr,
in a more genial spirit. He used to regret that the old Floral games and
processions on May-day and other holidays had gone out of fashion.
Southey tells us that in George the First's reign a grand Florist's
Feast was held at Bethnall Green, and that a carnation named after his
Majesty was _King of the Year_. The Stewards were dressed with laurel
leaves and flowers. They carried gilded staves. Ninety cultivators
followed in procession to the sound of music, each bearing his own
flowers before him. All elegant customs of this nature have fallen into
desuetude in England, though many of them are still kept up in other
parts of Europe.
Chaucer who dearly loved all images associated with the open air and the
dewy fields and bright mornings and radiant flowers makes the gentle
Emily,
That fairer was to seene
Than is the lily upon his stalkie greene,
rise early and do honor to the birth of May-day. All things now seem to
breathe of hope and joy.
Though long hath been
The trance of Nature on the naked bier
Where ruthless Winter mocked her slumbers drear
And rent with icy hand her robes of green,
That trance is brightly broken! Glossy trees,
Resplendent meads and variegated flowers
Flash in the sun and flutter in the breeze
And now with dreaming eye the poet sees
Fair shapes of pleasure haunt romantic bowers,
And laughing streamlets chase the flying hours.
D.L.R.
The great describer of our Lost Paradise did not disdain to sing a
SONG ON MAY-MORNING.
Now the bright Morning star, Day's harbinger,
Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose
Hail bounteous-May, that dost inspire
Mirth and youth and warm desire;
Woods and groves are of thy dressing,
Hill and dale do boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee and wish thee long.
Nor did the Poet of the World, William Shakespeare, hesitate to
Do observance to a morn of May.
He makes one of his characters (in _King Henry VIII_.) complain that it
is as impossible to keep certain persons quiet on an ordinary day, as it
is to make them sleep on May-day--once the time of universal merriment--
when every one was wont "_to put himself into triumph_."
'Tis as much impossible,
Unless we sweep 'em from the doors with cannons
To scatter 'em, _as 'tis to make 'em sleep
On May-day Morning_.
Spenser duly celebrates, in his "Shepheard's Calender,"
Thilke mery moneth of May
When love-lads masken in fresh aray,
when "all is yclad with pleasaunce, the ground with grasse, the woods
with greene leaves, and the bushes with bloosming buds."
Sicker[043] this morowe, no longer agoe,
I saw a shole of shepeardes outgoe
With singing and shouting and iolly chere:
Before them yode[044] a lustre tabrere,[045]
That to the many a hornepype playd
Whereto they dauncen eche one with his mayd.
To see those folks make such iovysaunce,
Made my heart after the pype to daunce.
Tho[046] to the greene wood they speeden hem all
To fetchen home May with their musicall;
And home they bringen in a royall throne
Crowned as king; and his queene attone[047]
Was LADY FLORA.
_Spenser_.
This is the season when the birds seem almost intoxicated with delight
at the departure of the dismal and cold and cloudy days of winter and
the return of the warm sun. The music of these little May musicians
seems as fresh as the fragrance of the flowers. The Skylark is the
prince of British Singing-birds--the leader of their cheerful band.
LINES TO A SKYLARK.
Wanderer through the wilds of air!
Freely as an angel fair
Thou dost leave the solid earth,
Man is bound to from his birth
Scarce a cubit from the grass
Springs the foot of lightest lass--
_Thou_ upon a cloud can'st leap,
And o'er broadest rivers sweep,
Climb up heaven's steepest height,
Fluttering, twinkling, in the light,
Soaring, singing, till, sweet bird,
Thou art neither seen nor heard,
Lost in azure fields afar
Like a distance hidden star,
That alone for angels bright
Breathes its music, sheds its light
Warbler of the morning's mirth!
When the gray mists rise from earth,
And the round dews on each spray
Glitter in the golden ray,
And thy wild notes, sweet though high,
Fill the wide cerulean, sky,
Is there human heart or brain
Can resist thy merry strain?
But not always soaring high,
Making man up turn his eye
Just to learn what shape of love,
Raineth music from above,--
All the sunny cloudlets fair
Floating on the azure air,
All the glories of the sky
Thou leavest unreluctantly,
Silently with happy breast
To drop into thy lowly nest.
Though the frame of man must be
Bound to earth, the soul is free,
But that freedom oft doth bring
Discontent and sorrowing.
Oh! that from each waking vision,
Gorgeous vista, gleam Elysian,
From ambition's dizzy height,
And from hope's illusive light,
Man, like thee, glad lark, could brook
Upon a low green spot to look,
And with home affections blest
Sink into as calm a nest! D.L.R.
I brought from England to India two English skylarks. I thought they
would help to remind me of English meadows and keep alive many agreeable
home-associations. In crossing the desert they were carefully lashed on
the top of one of the vans, and in spite of the dreadful jolting and the
heat of the sun they sang the whole way until night-fall. It was
pleasant to hear English larks from rich clover fields singing so
joyously in the sandy waste. In crossing some fields between Cairo and
the Pyramids I was surprized and delighted with the songs of Egyptian
skylarks. Their notes were much the same as those of the English lark.
The lark of Bengal is about the size of a sparrow and has a poor weak
note. At this moment a lark from Caubul (larger than an English lark) is
doing his best to cheer me with his music. This noble bird, though so
far from his native fields, and shut up in his narrow prison, pours
forth his rapturous melody in an almost unbroken stream from dawn to
sunset. He allows no change of season to abate his minstrelsy, to any
observable degree, and seems equally happy and musical all the year
round. I have had him nearly two years, and though of course he must
moult his feathers yearly, I have not observed the change of plumage,
nor have I noticed that he has sung less at one period of the year than
another. One of my two English larks was stolen the very day I landed in
India, and the other soon died. The loss of an English lark is not to be
replaced in Calcutta, though almost every week, canaries, linnets,
gold-finches and bull-finches are sold at public auctions here.
But I must return to my main subject.--The ancients used to keep the
great Feast of the goddess Flora on the 28th of April. It lasted till
the 3rd of May. The Floral Games of antiquity were unhappily debased by
indecent exhibitions; but they were not entirely devoid of better
characteristics.[048] Ovid describing the goddess Flora says that "while
she was speaking she breathed forth vernal roses from her mouth." The
same poet has represented her in her garden with the Florae gathering
flowers and the Graces making garlands of them. The British borrowed the
idea of this festival from the Romans. Some of our Kings and Queens used
'_to go a Maying_,' and to have feasts of wine and venison in the open
meadows or under the good green-wood. Prior says:
Let one great day
To celebrate sports and floral play
Be set aside.
But few people, in England, in these times, distinguish May-day from the
initial day of any other month of the twelve. I am old enough to
remember _Jack-in-the-Green_. Nor have I forgotten the cheerful
clatter--the brush-and-shovel music--of our little British
negroes--"innocent blacknesses," as Lamb calls them--the
chimney-sweepers,--a class now almost _swept away_ themselves by
_machinery_. One May-morning in the streets of London these
tinsel-decorated merry-makers with their sooty cheeks and black lips
lined with red, and staring eyes whose white seemed whiter still by
contrast with the darkness of their cases, and their ivory teeth kept
sound and brilliant with the professional powder, besieged George Selwyn
and his arm-in-arm companion, Lord Pembroke, for May-day boxes. Selwyn
making them a low bow, said, very s
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