Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
    Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love,
    News from the humming city comes to it
    In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
    And sitting muffled in dark leaves you hear
    The windy clanging of the minster clock;
    Although between it and the garden lies
    A league of grass.

Even “sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh” are often pleasing when mellowed by the space of air through which they pass.

    ’Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound.

Shelley, in one of his sweetest poems, speaking of a scene in the neighbourhood of Naples, beautifully says:—­

    Like many a voice of one delight,
    The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
    The city’s voice itself is soft, like solitude’s.

No doubt the feeling that we are near the crowd but not in it, may deepen the sense of our own happy rural seclusion and doubly endear that pensive leisure in which we can “think down hours to moments,” and in

    This our life, exempt from public haunt,
    Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

Shakespeare.

Besides, to speak truly, few men, however studious or philosophical, desire a total isolation from the world.  It is pleasant to be able to take a sort of side glance at humanity, even when we are most in love with nature, and to feel that we can join our fellow creatures again when the social feeling returns upon us.  Man was not made to live alone.  Cowper, though he clearly loved retirement and a garden, did not desire to have the pleasure entirely to himself.  “Grant me,” he says, “a friend in my retreat.”

    To whom to whisper solitude is sweet.

Cowper lived and died a bachelor.  In the case of a married man and a father, garden delights are doubled by the presence of the family and friends, if wife and children happen to be what they should be, and the friends are genuine and genial.

All true poets delight in gardens.  The truest that ever lived spent his latter days at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon.  He had a spacious and beautiful garden.  Charles Knight tells us that “the Avon washed its banks; and within its enclosures it had its sunny terraces and green lawns, its pleached alleys and honeysuckle bowers,” In this garden Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree.  It was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in 1548[009].  In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them.  Shakespeare’s tree was planted in 1609.  Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice mentioned