From time to time you encountered tufts of trees closely planted, and that cast as brown a shade as the thickest forest. These were partly composed of wood of the most pliant texture, the extremities of whose branches, bending to the earth, took root a second time in her bosom. Elsewhere the rasberry [sic], the rose, the lilac, and a thousand flowering shrubs, appeared in thickets without either regularity or symmetry, and contributed at once to adorn, and to give an air of rudeness and wildness to the prospect. Round the body of the trees, planted some at their root, and some upon the different parts of the trunk, crept the withy, the snakeweed, the ivy, and the hop, and intermingled with them the jessamine and the honeysuckle, in the most unbounded profusion. Their tendrils hung from the branches, and waved to the wind; and suggested to you the appearance of garlands scattered from tree to tree by the nymphs of the grove. All was inexpressible luxuriance, and a thousand different shades of verdure were placed, one upon another, in regular confusion, and attractive disorder. An exuberance of this sort was calculated in a vulgar scene to have checked the fertility of the plants, and to have given a sickly and withered appearance to their productions; but it was not so in the garden of Rodogune. There the cherry and the grape, the downy peach and the purple plum were half discovered amid the foliage of the hop, and the clusters of the woodbine. Beneath the delicious shade you wandered over beds of moss, undeformed with barren sands and intrusive weeds, and smooth as the level face of ocean when all the winds of heaven sleep.
Nor was this all. Inanimate and vegetable nature (and the observation had not escaped the penetration of Rodogune) adorn and arrange it as you will, infallibly suggests an idea of solitude, that communicates sadness to the mind. Accordingly your path was here beguiled with the warbling of a thousand birds, the full-toned blackbird, the mellow thrush, and the pensive nightingale. The sorceress had invited them to her retreat, by innumerable assiduities and innumerable conveniences of food and residence, and had suffered no rude intrusion to disturb the sacredness of their haunts. Unused to molestation in all their pursuits, they now showed no terror of human approach, but flew, and hopped, and sung, and played among the branches and along the ground, in thoughtless security and wanton defiance.
