"Alse other wonders of the sportive shears,
Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found:
Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers,
With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned;
And horizontal dials on the ground,
In living box by cunning artists traced;
And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound
But by their roots there ever anchored fast,
All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast."
[36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's edition.
[37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, Vol. II.
[38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788.
[39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271.
[40] "Life of Shenstone."
[41] See ante, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham.
[42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close of the Year 1748."
[43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley—"The British Tempe"-and the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of Shenstone."
[44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long correspondence about an urn which she was erecting to Somerville's memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and exchanged visits with Shenstone.