When passing in front of the coasts of Greece, I used to ask myself what had become of the four acres of the garden of Alcinous, shaded with pomegranate-trees, apple-trees, fig-trees and adorned with two fountains? Goodman Laertes' vegetable-garden in Ithaca no longer had its two and twenty pear-trees when I was sailing before that island, and they were not able to tell me if Zante was still the home of the hyacinth. The pleasure-ground of Academus, in Athens, offered a few stumps of olive-trees to my view, as did the Garden of Gethsemane at Jerusalem. I have not wandered in the gardens of Babylon, but Plutarch teaches us that they still existed in the time of Alexander. Carthage presented to me the aspect of a park strewn with the vestiges of Dido's palaces. At Granada, looking through the doorways of the Alhambra, I could not take my eyes from the groves in which the romance of Spain had placed the loves of the Zegris. From the top of David's house at Jerusalem, the King-Prophet saw Bethsabee bathing in Urias' gardens; I saw none pass there save a daughter of Eve, a poor Abigail, who will never inspire me with the magnificent Penitential Psalms. During the Conclave of 1828, I strolled in the Gardens of the Vatican. An eagle, plucked of its feathers and imprisoned in a den, presented the emblem of Pagan Rome overthrown; an emaciated rabbit was delivered as a prey to the bird of the Capitol, which had devoured the world. Monks have shown me, at Tusculum and Tibur, the waste fruit-groves of Cicero and Horace. I have shot wild-duck in Pliny's Laurentinum; the waves came to die at the foot of the wall of the dining-room, where, through three windows, one descried as it were three seas: _quasi tria maria._ In Rome herself, as I lay among the wild anemones of Bel Respiro, between the pine-trees that formed a vault above my head, the Sabine Range opened to the view in the distance; Albano enchanted my eyes with its azure mountain, whose lofty denticulations were fringed with gold by the last rays of the sun: a sight that became more admirable still when I came to think that Virgil had contemplated it, as I was doing, and that I was seeing it again, from the midst of the ruins of the city of the Cæsars, across the vine-branch of the Tomb of the Scipios[460]. If, from these Gardens of the Hesperides of poetry and history, I descend to the gardens of our days, how many have I seen born and die? Without speaking of the woods of Sceaux, Marly, Choisy, now razed to the level of the corn-fields, without speaking of the thickets of Versailles, which they purpose to restore to their festal condition! I too have planted gardens; my little water-furrow, which served as a passage for the winter rains, was in my eyes equal to the ponds of the _Prædium rusticum._