ON THE OTHER SIDE.— A PLEA EOR SAVAGERY. 193 



So much for the results of man's manipulation 

 of the universe in the way of making ornamental 

 grounds ! And the sketch here given applies equally 

 to the new style or to the old, to the garden after 

 Loudon or to the garden after Bacon ; the destiny 

 of things is equally interfered with to meet the 

 requirements of the one or the other ; the styles 

 are equall)- artificial, equally remorseless to primal 

 Nature. 



But one ma}- go farther, and ask : What wonder 

 at the outcry of the modern Nature-lovers against 

 a world so altered from its original self as that Haw- 

 thorne should say of England in general that here 

 "the wildest things are more than half tame? The 

 trees, for instance, whether in hedgerow, park, or 

 what they call forest, have nothing wild about them. 

 They are never ragged ; there is a certain decorous 

 restraint in the freest outspread of their branches ! " 

 Nay, so far does this mistaken man carry his diseased 

 appetite for English soil, marred as it is, that he 

 shall write : "To us Americans there is a kind of 

 sanctity even in an English turnip-field, when we 

 think how long that small square of ground has 

 been known and recognised as a possession, trans- 

 mitted from father to son, trodden often by memor- 

 able feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old 

 acquaintance with civilised eyes " (" Our Old Home," 

 P- 75)- 



What wonder, I say, that a land that is so hope- 

 lessly gardened as this— a land so sentimentalised 

 and humanised that its very clods, to the American, 



N 



