'A more delightful place, wherever hurled,
Through the whole air, Rogero had not found;
And had he ranged the universal world,
Would not have seen a lovelier in his round,
Than that, where, wheeling wide, the courser furled
His spreading wings, and lighted on the ground
Mid cultivated plain, delicious hill,
Moist meadow, shady bank, and crystal rill;
'Small thickets, with the scented laurel gay,
Cedar, and orange, full of fruit and flower,
Myrtle and palm, with interwoven spray,
Pleached in mixed modes, all lovely, form a bower;
And, breaking with their shade the scorching ray,
Make a cool shelter from the noon-tide hour.
And nightingales among those branches wing
Their flight, and safely amorous descants sing.
'Amid red roses and white lilies _there_,
Which the soft breezes freshen as they fly,
Secure the cony haunts, and timid hare,
And stag, with branching forehead broad and high.
These, fearless of the hunter's dart or snare,
Feed at their ease, or ruminating lie;
While, swarming in those wilds, from tuft or steep,
Dun deer or nimble goat disporting leap.'
_Rose's Orlando Furioso_.
Spenser's description of the garden of Adonis is too long to give
entire, but I shall quote a few stanzas. The old story on which Spenser
founds his description is told with many variations of circumstance and
meaning; but we need not quit the pages of the Faerie Queene to lose
ourselves amidst obscure mythologies. We have too much of these indeed
even in Spenser's own version of the fable.