ardens, thus expresses his own (perhaps expiring) wish in the
lines of Cowley:

Sweet shades, adieu! here let my dust remain,
Covered with flowers, and free from noise and pain;
Let evergreens the turfy tomb adorn,
And roseate dews (the glory of the morn)
My carpet deck; then let my soul possess
The happier scenes of an eternal bliss.

He asks "What solid pleasure is there not to be found in gardening? Its
pursuit is easy, quiet, and such as put neither the body nor mind into
those violent agitations, or precipitate and imminent dangers that many
other exercises (in themselves very warrantable) do. The end of this is
health, peace, and plenty, and the happy prospect of felicities more
durable than any thing in these sublunary regions, and to which this is
(next to the duties of religion) the surest path." His attachment to
some of our own poets, and to the classic authors of antiquity,
discovers itself in many of his pages; and his devout turn of mind
strongly shines throughout. His allusion to Homer, in vol. iii. page 7,
sufficiently shews how ardently this industrious servant, this barrow
wheeler, must have searched the great writers of ancient times, to
discover their attachment to rural nature, and to gardens. His candid
and submissive mind thus speaks:--"If we would, therefore, arrive at any
greater perfection than we are in gardening, we must cashiere that
mathematical stiffness in our gardens, and imitate nature more; how that
is to be done, will appear in the following chapters, which though they
may not be, as new designs scarce ever are, the most perfect, it will at
least excite some after-master to take pen and pencil in hand, and
finish what is here thus imperfectly begun, and this is my comfort, that
I shall envy no man that does it. I have, God be praised, learned to
admire, and not envy every one that outgoes me: and this will, I hope,
go a great way in making me easy and happy under the pressures of a very
narrow fortune, and amidst the ruffles of an ill-natured world. I have
tasted too severely of the lashes of man, to take any great
satisfaction in any thing but doing my duty."[39] In his devout and
magnificent Essay on the Sun, he says, "'tis admirable that this planet
should, through so many ages of the world, maintain an uninterrupted
course, that in so many thousands of revolving years, it should retain
the same light, heat, and vigour, and every morning renew its wonted
alacri