"But when no prelate's lawn with haircloth lined Is half so incoherent as my mind; When--each opinion with the next at strife, An ebb and flow of follies all my life-- I plant, root up; I build, and then confound; Turn round to square, and square again to round; You never change one muscle of your face; You think this madness but a common case." Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great romancer and builder of our time, he never allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of continued evil by working among his trees, and grottoes, and vines, and at his labors of poetry and translation. At the period succeeding the rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at his Homer with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds. In 1736, writing to Swift, he says: "I wish you had any motive to see this kingdom. I could keep you, for I am rich; that is, I have more room than I want. I can afford room for myself and two servants. I have, indeed, room enough; nothing but myself at home. The kind and hearty housewife is dead! The agreeable and instructive neighbor is gone! Yet my house is enlarged, and the gardens extend and flourish, as knowing nothing of the guests they have lost. I have more fruit-trees and kitchen garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better gardener as I am a worse poet than when you saw me; but gardening is more akin to philosophy, for Tully says, '_Agricultura proxima sapientiæ_.'" And toward the end of the same year he says, in a letter to Ralph Allen, "I am now as busy planting for myself as I was lately in planting for another; and I thank God for every wet day and for every fog that gives me the headache, but prospers my works. They will indeed outlive me, but I am pleased to think my trees will afford fruit and shade to others when I shall want them no more. And it is no sort of grief to me that those others will not be things of my own poor body; but it is enough that they are creatures of the same species, and made by the same hand that made me."