easure 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.

That voice yet speaketh, heed it well--
But not in tones of wrath it chideth,
The moss rose, and the lily smell
Of God--in them his voice abideth.

There is a blessing on the spot
The poor man decks--the sun delighteth
To smile upon each homely plot,
And why? The voice of God inviteth.

G