Positively, the Garden of Eden cannot have been more beautiful than this
private garden of Blenheim. It contains three hundred acres, and by
the artful circumlocution of the paths, and the undulations, and the
skilfully interposed clumps of trees, is made to appear limitless. The
sylvan delights of a whole country are compressed into this space,
as whole fields of Persian roses go to the concoction of an ounce of
precious attar. The world within that garden-fence is not the same weary
and dusty world with which we outside mortals are conversant; it is a
finer, lovelier, more harmonious Nature; and the Great Mother lends
herself kindly to the gardener's will, knowing that he will make evident
the half-obliterated traits of her pristine and ideal beauty, and allow
her to take all the credit and praise to herself. I doubt whether there
is ever any winter within that precinct,--any clouds, except the fleecy
ones of summer. The sunshine that I saw there rests upon my recollection
of it as if it were eternal. The lawns and glades are like the memory of
places where one has wandered when first in love.

What a good and happy life might be spent in a paradise like this! And
yet, at that very moment, the besotted Duke (ah! I have let out a secret
which I meant to keep to myself; but the ten shillings must pay for all)
was in that very garden, (for the guide told us so, and cautioned
our young people not to be uproarious,) and, if in a condition for
arithmetic, was thinking of nothing nobler than how many ten-shilling
tickets had that day been sold. Republican as I am, I should still love
to think that noblemen lead noble lives, and that all this stately and
beautiful environment may serve to elevate them a little way above the
rest of us. If it fail to do so, the disgrace falls equally upon the
whole race of mortals as on themselves; because it proves that no
more favorable conditions of existence would eradicate our vices and
weaknesses. How sad, if this be so! Even a herd of swine, eating the