this circumstance gave rise to the following paper. The holly reminded
us of the Czar Peter spoiling the garden-hedge at Sayes Court; this led
us to John Evelyn, the father of English gardening: and the laurels
drove us into shrubbery nooks, and all the retrospections of our early
days, and above all to our early love of gardens. Our enthusiasm was
then unaffected and uninfluenced by great examples; we had neither heard
nor read of Lord Bacon nor Sir William Temple, nor any other illustrious
writer on gardening; but this love was the pure offspring of our own
mind and heart. Planting and transplanting were our delight; the seed
which our tiny hands let fall into the bosom of the earth, we almost
watched peeping through little clods, after the kind and quickening
showers of spring; and we regarded the germinating of an upturned bean
with all the surprise and curiosity of our nature. As we grew in mind
and stature, we learned the loftier lessons of philosophy, and threw
aside the "Pocket Gardener," for the sublime chapters of Bacon and
Temple; and as the stream of life carried us into its vortex, we learned
to contemplate their pages as the living parterres of a garden, and
their bright imageries as fascinating flowers. As we journeyed onward
through the busy herds of crowded cities, we learned the holier
influences of gardens in reflecting that a garden has been the scene of
man's birth--his fall--and proffered redemption.

It would be difficult to find a subject which has been more fervently
treated by poets and philosophers, than the _love of gardens_. In old
Rome, poets sung of their gardens. Ovid is so fond of flowers, that in
his account of the Rape of Proserpine, in his Fasti, he devotes several
lines to the enumeration of flowers gathered by her attendants. But the
passion for gardening, which evidently came from the East, never
prevailed much in Europe till the times of the religious orders, who
greatly improved it.