The actual beauty of some of the commonest flowers in our gardens can be in no degree exaggerated—­even in the daydreams of the most inspired poet.  And when the author of Lalla Rookh talks so musically and pleasantly of the fragrant bowers of Amberabad, the country of Delight, a Province in Jinnistan or Fairy Land, he is only thinking of the shrubberies and flower-beds at Sloperton Cottage, and the green hills and vales of Wiltshire.

Sir William Temple observes that “besides the temper of our climate there are two things particular to us, that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens—­which are, the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf.”

“The face of England is so beautiful,” says Horace Walpole, “that I do not believe that Tempe or Arcadia was half so rural; for both lying in hot climates must have wanted the moss of our gardens.”  Meyer, a German, a scientific practical gardener, who was also a writer on gardening, and had studied his art in the Royal Gardens at Paris, and afterwards visited England, was a great admirer of English Gardens, but despaired of introducing our style of gardening into Germany, chiefly on account of its inferior turf for lawns.  “Lawns and gravel walks,” says a writer in the Quarterly Review, “are the pride of English Gardens,” “The smoothness and verdure of our lawns,” continues the same writer, “is the first thing in our gardens that catches the eye of a foreigner; the next is the fineness and firmness of our gravel walks.”  Mr. Charles Mackintosh makes the same observation.  “In no other country in the world,” he says, “do such things exist.”  Mrs. Stowe, whose Uncle Tom has done such service to the cause of liberty in America, on her visit to England seems to have been quite as much enchanted with our scenery, as was her countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick.  I am pleased to find Mrs. Stowe recognize the superiority of English landscape-gardening and of our English verdure.  She speaks of, “the princely art of landscape-gardening, for which England is so famous,” and of “vistas of verdure and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green as the velvet moss sometimes seen growing on rocks in new England.”  “Grass,” she observes, “is an art and a science in England—­it is an institution.  The pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling and otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the often-falling tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be appreciated.”  This is literally true:  any sight more inexpressibly exquisite than that of an English lawn in fine order is what I am quite unable to conceive.[003]