thy domain, strange contrast do present
To house and home in many a craggy tent
Of the wild Peak, where new born waters glide
Through fields whose thrifty occupants abide
As in a dear and chosen banishment
With every semblance of entire content;
So kind is simple Nature, fairly tried!
Yet he whose heart in childhood gave his troth
To pastoral dales, then set with modest farms,
May learn, if judgment strengthen with his growth,
That not for Fancy only, pomp hath charms;
And, strenuous to protect from lawless harms
The extremes of favored life, may honour both.

The two noblest of modern public gardens in England are those at
Kensington and Kew. Kensington Gardens were begun by King William the
III, but were originally only twenty-six acres in extent. Queen Anne
added thirty acres more. The grounds were laid out by the well-known
garden-designers, London and Wise.[034] Queen Caroline, who formed the
Serpentine River by connecting several detached pieces of water into
one, and set the example of a picturesque deviation from the straight
line,[035] added from Hyde Park no less than three hundred acres which
were laid out by Bridgeman. This was a great boon to the Londoners.
Horace Walpole says that Queen Caroline at first proposed to shut up St.
James's Park and convert it into a private garden for herself, but when
she asked Sir Robert Walpole what it would cost, he answered--"Only
three Crowns." This changed her intentions.

The reader of Pope will remember an allusion to the famous Ring in Hyde
Park. The fair Belinda was sometimes attended there by her guardian
Sylphs:

The light militia of the lower sky.

They guarded her from 'the white-gloved beaux,'

These though unseen are ever on the wing,
Hang o'er the box, _and hover o'er the Ring_.

It was here that the gallantries of the "Merry Monarch" were but too
often exhibited to his people. "After dinner," says the right garrulous
Pepys in his journal, "to Hyde Parke; at the Parke was the King, and in
another Coach, Lady Castlemaine, they greeting one another at every
turn."

The Gardens at Kew "Imperial Kew," as Darwin styles it, are the richest
in the world. They consist of one hundred and seventy acres. They were
once private gardens, and were long in the possession of Royalty, until
the accession of Queen Victoria, who opened the gardens to the public
and placed them under the control of the Comm