“Ye fields for ever fair! Thou mighty stream! Bright regions! blessed beyond the muse’s dream! Thou fruitful womb of ever-teeming earth! Ye fostering skies that rear each beauteous birth! Trees, that aloft uprear your stately height, Whose sombrous branches shed a noontide night! Groves, that for ever wear the smile of spring! Gay birds that wave the many-tinted wing! Of reptiles, fishes, brutes, stupendous forms! And ye, of nameless insects glittering swarms! Sons of soft toil, whose shuttle beauty throws, Whose tints the Graces’ earnest hands dispose, Whose guileless bosom Care avoid and Crime, Gay as your groves, and cloudless as your clime! Primæval piles, that rose in massive pride, Ere Western Art her first faint efforts tried! Ye Brachmans old, whom purer æras bore, Ere Western Science lisped her infant lore! How will your wonders flush the Athenian sage? How ray with glory my historic page?” In a letter to Hannah More, Horace Walpole says: “The poetry is most admirable; the similes beautiful, fine, and sometimes sublime; the author is a great poet, and could raise the passions, and possesses all the requisites of the art.” In another lively epistle to the Misses Berry (28th April, 1789), he says: “I send you the most delicious poem upon earth. I can read this Second Part over and over again for ever; for though it is so excellent, it is impossible to remember anything so disjointed, except you consider it as a collection of short enchanting Poems. ‘The Triumph of Flora,’ beginning at the fifty-ninth line, is most beautifully and enchantingly imagined, and the twelve verses that by miracle describe and comprehend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are, in my opinion, the most sublime passage in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted.”—ED.] [Darwin was acquainted with Rousseau. He was a man of great bodily and intellectual vigour, irascible and imperious, a strong advocate of temperance, and for many years an almost total abstainer. His professional fame was such that George III. said he would take him as his physician if he would come to London. He formed a botanical garden at Lichfield, about which Miss Seward wrote some verses which suggested his _Botanic Garden_. The _Loves of the Plants_ had a singular success, and was praised in a joint poem by Cowper and Hayley. It was translated into French, Portuguese, and Italian. Darwin himself is said by Edgeworth to have admired the parody (_Monthly Magazine_, June and Sept., 1802, p. 115). Coleridge (_Biographia Literaria_, 1817, p. 19) speaks of the impression which it made even upon good judges.