Give me a flower-garden, in the early morning, with its dry gravel-walks shining in the fresh sunbeams, and all the thousands of flowers which man's care and God's bounty have raised to beautify our dwellings, expanding their refreshed petals to the young light. The garden into which Colonel Manners now went forth was an old-fashioned one, with manifold beds, arranged in as many mathematical figures. Each bed, fringed with its close-cut green border of box, was full of as many flowers as it would hold, and as the season afforded; and though of late many a foreign land has been ransacked to procure new exotics for our grounds, yet even then the garden was not without its rich assortment of flowering shrubs; some still bearing the blossom, some fallen into the fruit. Between the beds--and, as the gardens were of very great extent, the beds were not very close together--were spaces of soft green turf, sometimes flanked with holly, or hedged with yew, so as to make a sort of little bowling-green; sometimes wide open to the gay sunshine, and full of innumerable thrushes and blackbirds, hopping along, with their fine shanks sunk amid the blades of grass. Here and there, too, was an arbour covered with clematis; and hothouses and green-houses now and then peeped out from behind the shrubberies, on the sunny side of the garden.
Colonel Manners took his way along a walk that flanked the enclosure to the east, and which, running by the side of the haw-haw, a little elevated above the park and surrounding country, gave, on the one side, an extensive prospect over a rich and smiling landscape, with the deer bounding over the grass, and the cattle lowing along the distant upland; and, on the other, showed the garden--somewhat formal, perhaps, but neat, and beautiful, and sparkling. He was a soldier, and a man of the world, and he loved books, and he did not dislike society; but, perhaps, there never was a man upon earth who more thoroughly enjoyed a solitary morning walk amid flowers and beautiful scenery--scenery in which one can pause and fill one's eye with fair sights, while the ideas springing from each particular blossom, or from the whole general view, can ramble out into a world of indistinct loveliness, wherein one can scarcely be said to think, but rather to live in a sensation of happiness which approaches near to heaven.