ras of reminiscences from several accounts of
natural or enchanted parks, and from various descriptions of that
elusive and danger-fraught garden which mystic geographers have studied
to locate from Florida to Cathay" (Cooper).

The earthly paradise, which was closed to man indeed, but not destroyed,
when Adam and Eve were driven from its gates, has exercised the
imagination of the Christian world from the early Middle Ages.
Lactantius described it in the fourth century; the author of the
"Phoenix," probably in the eighth century, translated Lactantius' Latin
into Anglo-Saxon verse; Sir John Mandeville, in the fourteenth century,
though he did not reach it himself because he "was not worthy," gives an
account of it from what he has "heard say of wise Men beyond;" Milton
described it enchantingly in "Paradise Lost;" Dr. Johnson used a
modification of it in "Rasselas;" and William Morris in our own time
made it the framework for a delightful series of world-old tales. The
idea, indeed, is not peculiar to Christianity, but is probably to be
found in every civilization. Christian Europe has naturally located it
in the East; and since the Crusades, which brought Western Europe more
in contact with the East, various eastern legends have been attached to
or confounded with the original notion. One of these is the Abyssinian
legend of the hill Amara (cf. l. 41, where Coleridge's "Mount Abora"
seems to stand for Purchas's Amara). Amara in Purchas's account is a
hill in a great plain in Ethiopia, used as a prison for the sons of
Abyssinian kings. Its level top, twenty leagues in circuit and
surrounded by a high wall, is a garden of delight. "Heauen and Earth,
Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting
their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking
this for the place of our Forefathers Paradise." The sides of the hill
are of overhanging rock, "bearing out like mushromes, so that it is
impossible to ascend it" except by a passageway "cut out within the
Rocke, not with staires, but ascending little by little," and closed
above and below with gates guarded by soldiers. "Toward the South" of
the level top "is a rising hill ... yeelding ... a pleasant spring which
passeth through all that Plaine ... and making a Lake, whence issueth a
River, which having from these tops espied Nilus, never leaves seeking
to find him, whom he cannot leave both to seeke and to finde.... There
are no Citie