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 Loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen And desolation saddens all the green,– _One only master grasps thy whole domain_.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