The gently budding rose (quoth she) behold,
    That first scant peeping forth with virgin beams,
    Half ope, half shut, her beauties doth upfold
    In their dear leaves, and less seen, fairer seems,
    And after spreads them forth more broad and bold,
    Then languisheth and dies in last extreams,
      Nor seems the same, that decked bed and bower
      Of many a lady late, and paramour.

    So, in the passing of a day, doth pass
    The bud and blossom of the life of man,
    Nor ere doth flourish more, but like the grass
    Cut down, becometh wither’d, pale and wan: 
    O gather then the rose while time thou hast,
    Short is the day, done when it scant began;
      Gather the rose of love, while yet thou may’st
      Loving be lov’d; embracing, be embrac’d.

    He ceas’d, and as approving all he spoke,
    The quire of birds their heav’nly tunes renew,
    The turtles sigh’d, and sighs with kisses broke,
    The fowls to shades unseen, by pairs withdrew;
    It seem’d the laurel chaste, and stubborn oak,
    And all the gentle trees on earth that grew,
      It seem’d the land, the sea, and heav’n above,
      All breath’d out fancy sweet, and sigh’d out love.

Godfrey of Bulloigne

I must place near the garden of Armida, Ariosto’s garden of Alcina.  “Ariosto,” says Leigh Hunt, “cared for none of the pleasures of the great, except building, and was content in Cowley’s fashion, with “a small house in a large garden.”  He loved gardening better than he understood it, was always shifting his plants, and destroying the seeds, out of impatience to see them germinate.  He was rejoicing once on the coming up of some “capers” which he had been visiting every day, to see how they got on, when it turned out that his capers were elder trees!”

THE GARDEN OF ALCINA.

    ’A more delightful place, wherever hurled,
      Through the whole air, Rogero had not found;
    And had he ranged the universal world,
      Would not have seen a lovelier in his round,
    Than that, where, wheeling wide, the courser furled
      His spreading wings, and lighted on the ground
    Mid cultivated plain, delicious hill,
      Moist meadow, shady bank, and crystal rill;

    ’Small thickets, with the scented laurel gay,
      Cedar, and orange, full of fruit and flower,
    Myrtle and palm, with interwoven spray,
      Pleached in mixed modes, all lovely, form a bower;
    And, breaking with their shade the scorching ray,
      Make a cool shelter from the noon-tide hour. 
    And nightingales among those branches wing
      Their flight, and safely amorous descants sing.