O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, (135) Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: (140) So excellent a king; that was, to this.
Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.
Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. ‘The Spirit is a garden,’ said he
The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less,
it comes or it lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden
and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world.
In fine weather the old gentelman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight.
Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude.
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
It sound of funeral or of marriage bells.