Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Milton, after the fourth line of his Comus, had originally inserted, in his manuscript draft of the poem, the following description of the garden of the Hesperides.

THE GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES

    Amid the Hesperian gardens, on whose banks
    Bedewed with nectar and celestial songs
    Eternal roses grow, and hyacinth,
    And fruits of golden rind, on whose fair tree
    The scaly harnessed dragon ever keeps
    His uninchanted eye, around the verge
    And sacred limits of this blissful Isle
    The jealous ocean that old river winds
    His far extended aims, till with steep fall
    Half his waste flood the wide Atlantic fills;
    And half the slow unfathomed Stygian pool
    But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder
    With distant worlds and strange removed climes
    Yet thence I come and oft from thence behold
    The smoke and stir of this dim narrow spot

Milton subsequently drew his pen through these lines, for what reason is not known.  Bishop Newton observes, that this passage, saved from intended destruction, may serve as a specimen of the truth of the observation that

    Poets lose half the praise they should have got
    Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Waller.

As I have quoted in an earlier page some unfavorable allusions to Homer’s description of a Grecian garden, it will be but fair to follow up Milton’s picture of Paradise, and Tasso’s garden of Armida, and Ariosto’s Garden of Alcina, and Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and his Bower of Bliss, with Homer’s description of the Garden of Alcinous.  Minerva tells Ulysses that the Royal mansion to which the garden of Alcinous is attached is of such conspicuous grandeur and so generally known, that any child might lead him to it;

            For Phoeacia’s sons
    Possess not houses equalling in aught
    The mansion of Alcinous, the king.

I shall give Cowper’s version, because it may be less familiar to the reader than Pope’s, which is in every one’s hand.

THE GARDEN OF ALCINOUS

Without the court, and to the gates adjoined
A spacious garden lay, fenced all around,
Secure, four acres measuring complete,
There grew luxuriant many a lofty tree,
Pomgranate, pear, the apple blushing bright,
The honeyed fig, and unctuous olive smooth. 
Those fruits, nor winter’s cold nor summer’s heat
Fear ever, fail not, wither not, but hang
Perennial, while unceasing zephyr breathes
Gently on all, enlarging these, and those
Maturing genial; in an endless course. 
Pears after pears to full dimensions swell,
Figs follow figs, grapes clustering grow again
Where clusters grew, and (every apple stripped)