70 Frederick Law Olmsted 



to rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me 

 realize that my secluded life, country breeding, and mis- 

 education were not such bars to an "intellectual life" as I 

 was in the habit of supposing. Or, if this is too personal, let 

 me say that, through visiting at your house the first winter 

 I was at New Haven with John, I was given a turn, not to 

 study, but toward an "intellectual life" to which I feel that 

 nearly all that I have been saying complacently of my doings 

 is to be remotely attributed. You will smile of my thinking 

 of you at all as a mentor, especially in a literary way, if you 

 remember a certain Christmas present that you gave me: 

 (It was burned thirty years afterwards with some heirlooms, 

 autograph letters of Washington and Webster and other 

 treasures). But in some way in which you had to do, I was 

 led up at that time to Emerson, Lowell and Ruskin, and 

 other real prophets who have been familiar friends ever 

 since. (Here they are on my bed-table) . And these gave me 

 the needed respect for my own constitutional tastes and an 

 incHnation to poetical refinement in the cultivation of them 

 that afterwards determined my profession. Yet that is not 

 quite fair, for I had had two lifts in the same direction before. 

 One, when I had heard my father reading the books of travel 

 in New England of President Dwight, Professor Silliman and 

 Miss Martineau, in all of which the observations on scenery 

 with which I was familiar had helped to make me think that 

 the love of nature, not simply as a naturalist but as a poet 

 loves it, was respectable. The other, when, yet a boy, I 

 found in the Hartford Public Library certain books, which it 

 is a strange thing that I should have looked into; stranger 

 that I should have assimilated as much as, when re-reading 

 them perhaps twenty years afterwards, I found that I had. 

 They were Price on the Picturesque and Gilpin on Forest 

 Scenery, — books of the last century, but which I esteem so 

 much more than any published since, as stimulating the 

 exercise of judgment in matters of my art, that I put them 

 into the hands of my pupils as soon as they come into our 



