when every animal is cheerfully running its little circle, shall that called rational, to whom only it is given to look back to remote ages, and forward to future existence, who has resources of recollection and expectation, be discontented and ill-humoured? how many powers must we neglect! how many mercies must we forget, before we fall into melancholy! hence, loathed melancholy! I will have none of it. --Elizabeth Montagu to Gilbert West, Sandleford, 26 June 1755 (Letters 3: 295) I am ashamed to say, that without any illness, my spirits and strength are so subdued, that I enjoy nothing , tho' I am sensible of numberless blessings that surround I think it almost impious, to say that I am not amusable. I am in most respects well, and cannot account for my depression. --Elizabeth [Charlton] Montagu to Matthew Montagu, Sandleford, 19 Oct. 1790 Written half a century apart, my two opening quotations could hardly seem more different. From as early as 1740s, Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu wrote letters to her friends about pleasures of a country life; through to 1790s, she continued to write such letters even as her niece, Elizabeth Charlton Montagu, was expressing a sense of unaccountable depression. Despite such obvious differences, however, two women's letters share characteristic maneuvers as they confront problem of depression, and it is characteristic nature of these maneuvers that is a central concern of this essay. It is not simply that two women wrote from same location--the elder Montagu's country estate at Sandleford in Berkshire--nor that letters were written by aunt and niece. Rather, each writer has a clear awareness of alternative states of mind and of cultural expectations placed upon them as women when writing from a garden. Certainly elder Montagu claims to reject melancholy, but that rejection inevitably conjures up presence, or fear, of low spirits which she associates with life away from town. (1) For Charlton Montagu, depression comes in spite of--indeed because of--her awareness of the numberless blessings that surround me, and that sense of failed duty, of visible but unavailable pleasures, is, I will argue, characteristic of women who write from country of an experience variously described as a depression of spirits, as lowness, or more simply as depression. Though relationship and location of two Montagus is peculiarly close, I will also argue that it is more than coincidental that an engagement with depression is expressed from within a landscape garden; rather, cultural weight put on garden as a site for moral rectitude or easy pleasure makes this almost inevitable. Thus, this essay focuses on sense of solitude, loneliness, and debilitating failure so characteristic of depression, but also on garden as a space in which both resistance to and fear of low spirits is played out. I draw on private letters of eighteenth-century women who owned or inhabited culturally privileged but acutely gendered space of landscape garden, and I turn to a characteristic language of depression expressed in terms of languor, low spirits, and melancholy; to strikingly articulate nature of that expression; and to abiding sense of shame so often expressed in terms of failure of religious duty. As numerous modern accounts of depression demonstrate, a clear or simple diagnosis of depression remains elusive (for example, see Gilbert, Papageorgiou and Wells, and Wolpert), and I am certainly not going to try to offer one here; however, as Lewis Wolpert has noted, until at least end of eighteenth century there was a tendency to equate depression with either an imbalance of humors, or with a disorder of soul expressed in terms of joylessness, abandonment, and unaccountable loss (18). It is these latter expressions in which I am interested, and in particular I am concerned with a self-expressed language of depression used by women in that highly charged space which is garden. …