Live in description and look green in song,
or the sight of a few flowers on a window-sill in the city, can fill the eye with tears of tenderness, or make the secret passion for nature burst out again in sudden gusts of tumultuous pleasure and lighten up the soul with images of rural beauty. There are few, indeed, who, when they have the good fortune to escape on a summer holiday from the crowded and smoky city and find themselves in the heart of a delicious garden, have not a secret consciousness within them that the scene affords them a glimpse of a true paradise below. Rich foliage and gay flowers and rural quiet and seclusion and a smiling sun are ever associated with ideas of earthly felicity.
And oh, if there be an Elysium on earth,
It is this, it is this!
The princely merchant and the petty trader, the soldier and the sailor, the politician and the lawyer, the artist and the artisan, when they pause for a moment in the midst of their career, and dream of the happiness of some future day, almost invariably fix their imaginary palace or cottage of delight in a garden, amidst embowering trees and fragrant flowers. This disposition, even in the busiest men, to indulge occasionally in fond anticipations of rural bliss--
In visions so profuse of pleasantness--
shows that God meant us to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of his works. The taste for a garden is the one common feeling that unites us all.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
There is this much of poetical sensibility--of a sense of natural beauty--at the core of almost every human heart. The monarch shares it with the peasant, and Nature takes care that as the thirst for her society is the universal passion, the power of gratifying it shall be more or less within the reach of all.[115]
Our present Chief Justice, Sir Lawrence Peel, who has set so excellent an example to his countrymen here in respect to Horticultural pursuits and the tasteful embellishment of what we call our "compounds" and who, like Sir William Jones and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, sees no reason why Themis should be hostile to the Muses, has obliged me with the following stanzas on the moral or rather religious influence of a garden. They form a highly appropriate and acceptable contribution to this volume.
I HEARD THY VOICE IN THE GARDEN.