io8 Frederick Law Olmsted 



impressiveness, in any way, from scenery, is not often to be 

 found in a few prominent, distinguishable features, but in 

 the manner and the unobserved materials with which these 

 are connected and combined. Clouds, lights, states of the 

 atmosphere, and circumstances that we cannot always de- 

 tect, affect all landscapes, and especially landscapes in which 

 the vicinity of a body of water is an element, much more than 

 we are often aware. So it is that the impatient first glance 

 of the young traveller, or the impertinent critical stare of 

 the old tourist, is almost never satisfied, if the honest 

 truth be admitted, in what it has been led to previously 

 imagine. I have heard "Niagara is a mill-dam," "Rome is 

 a htimbug." 



The deep sentiments of nature that we sometimes seem 

 to have been made the confidant of, when among the moun- 

 tains, or on the moors or the ocean, — even those of man 

 wrought out in architecture and sculpture and painting, or 

 of man working in unison with Nature, as sometimes in 

 the English parks, on the Rhine, and here on the Isle of 

 Wight, — such revealings are beyond words; they never 

 could be transcribed into note-books and diaries, and so de- 

 scriptions of them become caricatures, and when we see 

 them, we at first say we are disappointed that we find not 

 the monsters we were told of. 



Dame Nature is a gentlewoman. No guide's fee will 

 obtain you her favour, no abrupt demand; hardly will she 

 bear questioning, or direct, curious gazing at her beauty; 

 least of all, will she reveal it truly to the hurried glance of 

 the passing traveller, while he waits for his dinner, or fresh 

 horses, or fuel and water; always we must quietly and unim- 

 patiently wait upon it. Gradually and silently the charm 

 comes over us; the beauty has entered our souls; we know 

 not exactly when or how, but going away we remember it 

 with a tender, subdued, filial-like joy. 



Does this seem nonsense to you? Very likely, for I am 

 talking of what I don't understand. Nature treats me so 



