[4] Our blessed Saviour chose the garden sometime for his oratory, and, dying, for the place of his sepulture; and we also do avouch, for many weighty causes, that there are none more fit to bury our dead in than in our gardens and groves where our beds may he decked with verdant and fragrant flowers.  Trees and perennial plants, the most natural and instructive hieroglyphics of our expected resurrection and immortality, besides what they might conduce to the meditation of the living, and the taking off our cogitations from dwelling too intently upon more vain and sensual objects:  that custom of burying in churches, and near about them, especially in great and populous cities, being both a novel presumption, indecent, and very prejudicial to health.—­Evelyn’s Discourse on Forest Trees.

* * * * *

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

PREPARATIONS FOR A JOURNEY.

I am fond of travelling:  yet I never undertake a journey without experiencing a vague feeling of melancholy.  There is to me something strangely oppressive in the preliminaries of departure.  The packing of a small valise; the settlement of accounts—­justly pronounced by Rabelais a blue-devilish process; the regulation of books and papers;—­in short, the whole routine of valedictory arrangements, are to me as a nightmare on the waking spirit.  They induce a mood of last wills and testaments—­a sense of dislocation, which, next to a vacuum, Nature abhors—­and create a species of moral decomposition, not unlike that effected on matter by chemical agency.  It is not that I have to lament the disruption of social connexions or domestic ties.  This, I am aware, is a trial sometimes borne with exemplary fortitude; and I was lately edified by the magnanimous unconcern with which a married friend of mine sang the last verse of “Home! sweet home!” as the chaise which was to convey him from the burthen of his song drove up to the door.  It does not become a bachelor to speculate on the mysteries of matrimonial philosophy; but the feeling of pain with which I enter on the task of migration has no affinity with individual sympathies, or even with domiciliary attachments.  My landlady is, without exception, the ugliest woman in London; and the locality of Elbow-lane cannot be supposed absolutely to spellbind the affection of one occupying, as I do, solitary chambers on the third floor.

The case, it may be supposed, is much worse when it is my lot to take leave, after passing a few weeks at the house of a friend in the country;—­a house, for instance, such as is to be met with only in England:—­with about twenty acres of lawn, but no park; with a shrubbery, but no made-grounds; with well-furnished rooms, but no conservatory; and with a garden, in which dandy tulips and high-bred anemones do not disdain the fellowship of honest artichokes