Among many other arts and excellencies which you enjoy, I am glad to find this favourite of mine the most predominant, that you choose this for your wife, though you have hundreds of other arts for your concubines; though you know them, and beget sons upon them all (to which you are rich enough to allow great legacies), yet the issue of this seems to be designed by you to the main of the estate; you have taken most pleasure in it, and bestowed most charges upon its education, and I doubt not to see that book which you are pleased to promise to the world, and of which you have given us a large earnest in your calendar, as accomplished as anything can be expected from an extraordinary wit and no ordinary expenses and a long experience. I know nobody that possesses more private happiness than you do in your garden, and yet no man who makes his happiness more public by a free communication of the art and knowledge of it to others. All that I myself am able yet to do is only to recommend to mankind the search of that felicity which you instruct them how to find and to enjoy. I. Happy art thou whom God does bless With the full choice of thine own happiness; And happier yet, because thou’rt blessed With prudence how to choose the best. In books and gardens thou hast placed aright,— Things which thou well dost understand, And both dost make with thy laborious hand— Thy noble, innocent delight, And in thy virtuous wife, where thou again dost meet Both pleasures more refined and sweet: The fairest garden in her looks, And in her mind the wisest books. Oh! who would change these soft, yet solid joys, For empty shows and senseless noise, And all which rank ambition breeds, Which seem such beauteous flowers, and are such poisonous weeds! II. When God did man to his own likeness make, As much as clay, though of the purest kind By the Great Potter’s art refined, Could the Divine impression take, He thought it fit to place him where A kind of heaven, too, did appear, As far as earth could such a likeness bear. That Man no happiness might want, Which earth to her first master could afford, He did a garden for him plant By the quick hand of his omnipotent word, As the chief help and joy of human life, He gave him the first gift; first, even, before a wife. III.