From Tatler: By the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq
No. 218. Thursday, August 30, 1710.
Scriptorum Chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbes.
Hor.
From my own apartment, August 29.
I CHANCED to rise very early one particular morning this summer, and took a walk into the country to di∣vert myself among the fields and meadows, while the green was new, and the flowers in their bloom. As at this season of the year every lane is a beautiful walk, and every hedge full of nosegays, I lost myself with a great deal of pleasure among several thickets and bushes that were filled with a great variety of birds, and an agreeable confusion of notes, which formed the pleasantest scene in the world to one who had passed a whole winter in noise and smoke. The freshness of the dews that lay up∣on every thing about me, with the cool breath of the morning, which inspired the birds with so many delight∣ful instincts, created in me the same kind of animal plea∣sure, and made my heart overflow with such secret emo∣tions of joy and satisfaction as are not to be described or accounted for. On this occasion, I could not but re∣flect upon a beautiful simile in Milton:
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick, and sewers, annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages, and farms
Adjoin'd, from each thing met conceives delight:
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound.
Those who are conversant in the writings of polite authors, receive an additional entertainment from the country, as it revives in their memories those charming descriptions with which such authors do frequently a∣bound.
I was thinking of the foregoing beautiful simile in Milton, and applying it to myself, when I observed to the windward of me a black cloud falling to the earth in long trails of rain, which made me betake myself for shelter to a house which I saw at a little distance from the place where I was walking. As I sat in the porch, I heard the voices of two or three persons, who seemed very ear∣nest in discourse. My curiosity was raised when I heard the names of Alexander the Great and Artaxerxes; and as their talk seemed to run on ancient heroes, I concluded there could not be any secret in it; for which reason I thought I might very fairly listen to what they said.
After several parallels between great men, which ap∣peared to me altogether groundless and chimerical, I was surprized to hear one say, that he valued the Black Prince more than the duke of Vendosme. How the duke of Ven∣dosme should become a rival of the Black Prince's, I could not conceive: and was more startled when I heard a second affirm with great vehemence, that if the emperor of Germany was not going off, he should like him better than either of them. He added, That though the season was so changeable, the duke of Marlborough was in blom∣ing beauty. I was wondering to myself from whence they had received this odd intelligence, especially when I heard them mention the names of several other great generals, as the prince of Hesse, and the king of Sweden, who, they said, were both running away. To which they added, what I entirely agreed with them in, that the crown of France was very weak, but that the mareschal Villars still kept his colours. At last one of them told the company, if they would go along with him, he would shew them a chimney-sweeper and a painted lady in the same bed, which he was sure would very much please them. The shower which had driven them, as well as myself, into the house, was now over: and as they were passing by me into the garden, I asked them to let me be one of their company.
The gentleman of the house told me, If I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while, for that he believ∣ed he could shew me such a blow of tulips as was not to be matched in the whole country.
I accepted the offer, and immediately found that they had been talking in terms of gardening, and that the kings and generals they had mentioned were only so many tulips, to which the gardeners, according to their usual custom, had given such high titles and appellations of honour.
I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us. Sometimes I considered them with the eye of an ordinary spectator as so many beauti∣ful objects, varnished over with a natural gloss, and stained with such a variety of colours, as are not to be equalled in any artificial dyes or tinctures. Sometimes I considered every leaf as an elaborate piece of tissue, in which the threads and fibres were woven together into different configurations, which gave a different colouring to the light as it glanced on the several parts of the sur∣face. Sometimes I considered the whole bed of tulips, according to the notion of the greatest mathematician and philosopher that ever lived, as a multitude of optic instruments, designed for the separating light into all those various colours of which it is composed.
I was awakened out of these my philosophical specu∣lations, by observing the company often seemed to laugh at me. I accidentally praised a tulip as one of the finest that I ever saw; upon which they told me, it was a com∣mon fool's-coat. Upon that I praised a second, which it seems was but another kind of fool's-coat. I had the same fate with two or three more; for which reason I desired the owner of the garden to let me know which were the finest of the flowers, for that I was so unskilful in the art, that I thought the most beautiful were the most valu∣able, and that those which had the gayest colours were the most beautiful. The gentleman smiled at my ignorance: he seemed a very plain honest man, and a person of good sense, had not his head been touched with that distemper which Hippocrates calls the Tulippo-Mania, 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉; insomuch that he would talk very rationally on any subject in the world but a tulip.
He told me, that he valued the bed of flowers which lay before us, and was not above twenty yards in length, and two in breadth, more than he would the best hundred acres of land in England; and added, that it would have been worth twice the money it is, if a foolish cook-maid of his had not almost ruined him the last winter, by mistaking an handful of tulip-roots for an heap of onions, and by that means, says he, made me a dish of pottage, that cost me above 1000 l. sterling. He then shewed me what he thought the finest of his tulips, which I found received all their value from their rarity and oddness, and put me in mind of your great fortunes, which are not always the greatest beauties.
I have often looked upon it as a piece of happiness, that I have never fallen into any of these fantastical tastes, nor esteemed any thing the more for its being uncommon and hard to be met with. For this reason, I look upon the whole country in spring-time as a spacious garden, and make as many visits to a spot of daisies, or a bank of violets, as a florist does to his borders and parterres. There is not a bush in blossom within a mile of me which I am not acquainted with, nor scarce a daffadil or cow∣slip that withers away in my neighbourhood without my missing it. I walked home in this temper of mind through several fields and meadows with an unspeakable pleasure, not without reflecting on the bounty of providence, which has made the most pleasing and most beautiful ob∣jects the most ordinary and most common.
我在錄音一篇沉櫻翻譯的文章。 我蠻想找找這個英國作者是誰的。 可惜沉櫻的那本書上沒有英文名字。 我只知道書裡講到鬱金香。 查了半天鬱金香都找不到， 最後還是嘗試拼拼看英國作者的名字才找到這篇文章。 而且竟然找到全篇文章。 (來源： https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004786805.0001.000/1:55?rgn=div1;view=fulltext)