ces his garden
"_near some fair town_." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired
poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has
the garden of his preference, "_not quite beyond the busy world_."

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass.

Even "sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh" are often pleasing
when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the _sound_.

Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the
neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:--

Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
_The city's voice itself is soft_, like solitude's.

No doubt the feeling that we are _near_ the crowd but not _in_ it, may
deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that
pensive leisure in which we can "think down hours to moments," and in

This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

_Shakespeare_.

Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical,
desire a total isolation from the world. It is pleasant to be able to
take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love
with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again
when the social feeling returns upon us. Man was not made to live alone.
Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire
to have the pleasure entirely to himself. "Grant me," he says, "a friend
in my retreat."

To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.

Cowper lived and died a bachelor. In the case of a married man and a
father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and
friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the
friends are genuine and genial.

All true poets delight in gardens. The truest that ever lived spent his
latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had a spacious and
beautiful garden. Charles Knight tells us that "the Avon washed its
banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terr