GARDEN.

THERE lavish Nature in her best attire,

Pours forth sweet odours and alluring sights;
And Art, with her contending, doth aspire,

To excel the natural with made delights;
And all that fair or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excess doth there abound.

Spenser, Muiopotmos.

GARDEN.

THE most exquisite delights of sense are pursued in the contrivance and plantation of gardens, which, with fruits, flowers, shades, fountains, and the music of birds that frequent such happy places, seem to furnish all the pleasures of the several senses, and with the greatest, or at least the most natural perfections.

As a garden has been the inclination of kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has been the common favourite 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 nor too low.

Sir W. Temple, Essay on Gardening (1685).

GARDEN.

I LOOK upon the pleasure which we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life. A garden was the habitation of our first parents before the fall. It is naturally apt to fill the mind with calmness and tranquillity, and to lay all its turbulent passions at rest. It gives us a great insight into the contrivance and wisdom of Providence, and suggests innumerable subjects for meditation. I cannot but think the very complacency and satisfaction which a man takes in these works of nature to be a laudable, if not a virtuous, habit of mind. Addison, Spectator, No. 477.

GARDEN.

A GARDEN has ever had the praise and affection of the wise. What is requisite to make a wise and happy man, but reflection and peace? And both are the natural growth of a garden. Nor is a garden a promoter only of a good man's happiness, but a picture of it; and in some sort shows him to himself. Its culture, order, fruitfulness, and seclusion from the world, compared to the weeds, wildness, and exposure of a common field, is no bad emblem of a good man compared to the multitude. A garden weeds the mind; it weeds it of worldly thoughts, and sows celestial seed in its stead.-Who cannot look on a flower, till he frightens himself out of infidelity?

Young, Essay on Pleasure.

GARDEN.

I AM just come out of the garden in the most oriental of all evenings, and from breathing odours beyond those of Araby. The acacias, which the Arabians have the sense to worship, are covered with blossoms, the honeysuckles dangle from every tree in festoons, the syringas are thickets of sweets, and the new-cut hay in the field tempers the balmy gales with simple freshness, while a thousand skyrockets launched into the air at Ranelagh or Marybone, illuminate the scene, and give it an air of Haroun Alraschid's paradise. Horace Walpole, Letter to Geo. Montagu from Strawberry Hill, June 10, 1765.

GARDEN OF ADONIS.

T HERE is continual spring, and harvest there
Continual, both meeting at one time :
For both the boughs do laughing blossoms bear,

And with fresh colours deck the wanton prime,

And eke at once the heavy trees they climb, Which seem to tremble under their fruits' load: The whiles the joyous birds make their pastime Amongst the shady leaves, their sweet abode, And their true loves without suspicion tell abroad. Spenser, Faerie Queene, b. iii. c. vi. 42.

GARDEN OF ALCINOUS.

CLOSE to the gates a spacious garden lies,
From storms defended and inclement skies.
Four acres was the allotted space of ground,
Fenced with a green enclosure all around.
Tall thriving trees confessed the fruitful mould;
The reddening apple ripens here to gold.
Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows,
With deeper red the full pomegranate glows;
'The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear,
And verdant olives flourish round the year.
The balmy spirit of the western gale

Eternal breathes on fruits untaught to fail;
Each dropping pear a following pear supplies,
On apples apples, figs on figs arise:

The same mild season gives the blooms to blow,
The buds to harden, and the fruits to grow.
Here ordered vines in equal ranks appear,
With all the united labours of the year ;
Some to unload the fertile branches run,
Some dry the blackening clusters in the sun;
Others to tread the liquid harvest join,
The groaning presses foam with floods of wine,
Here are the vines in early flower descried,
Here grapes discoloured on the sunny side,
And there in autumn's richest purple dyed.
Beds of all various herbs, for ever green,
In beauteous order terminate the scene.

Pope-Homer, Odyssey, b. vii.

GARDENING.

AGRICULTURE produces good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind; by gardening we enjoy the pure delicacies of agriculture.

GENEROSITY.

Joubert.

BASE grovelling souls ne'er know true honour's worth,
But weigh it out in mercenary scales:

The secret pleasure of a generous act

Is the great mind's great bribe.

Dryden, Don Sebastian, act v.

GENEROSITY.

GENEROSITY Covers almost all other defects, and raises a blaze around them in which they disappear and are lost; like sovereign beauty, it makes a short cut to our affections, it wins our hearts without resistance or delay, and unites all the world to favour and support its designs.

GENEROSITY.

James Usher,

THE most selfish thing I know in the world is generosity; but what a selfishness!

Greville, Maxims (1756).

GENIUS.

A HAPPY genius is the gift of Nature: it depends on the influence of the stars, say the astrologers; on the organs of the body, say the naturalists: it is the particular gift of heaven, say the divines, both Christian and heathens. How to improve it many books can teach us, how to obtain it, none: that nothing can be done without it, all agree :

Tu nihil invitâ dices faciesve Minervâ.

Dryden, A Parallel of Poetry and Painting.

GENIUS.

To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concerning them-this is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. Who has not a thousand times seen it snow upon water? Who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure :

'Or like the snowfall in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever'?

Coleridge, The Friend, Essay xv.

GENIUS.

AGES elapsed ere Homer's lamp appeared,
And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard ;
To carry Nature lengths unknown before,
To give a Milton birth, asked ages more.
Thus genius rose and set at ordered times,
And shot a dayspring into distant climes,
Ennobling every region that he chose:
He sunk in Greece, in Italy he rose ;
And, tedious years of Gothic darkness past,
Emerged, all splendour, in our isle at last.
Thus lovely halcyons dive into the main,
And show far off their shining plumes again.

Cowper, Table Talk.

L