164 PARKS AND PLEASDKE-GROUNDS. 



the artist goes back to survey his work, and finds that 

 his ground outlines have been carefully preserved, but 

 probably discovers also that the gray poplar, with its 

 nirv form and silvery foliage, has been substituted for 

 the robust and grave-tinted oak; or that the spiry, 

 lio'ht-irreen, deciduous larch has taken the place in- 

 tended for the rounded cone and dark-green color of 

 the Scotch fir. And yet his art, or his skill in the ex- 

 ercise of it, has to bear the blame of these errors ! It 

 would be almost as reasonable to expect a fine land- 

 scape-painting, were we to commission an artist to 

 trace the outlines of the picture, and then to leave the 

 coloring, the management of the lights and shades, 

 and the filling-up generally, to a house-painter, who 

 undoubtedly can handle a brush as well as a forester 

 or a day-laborer can waeld a spade. 



Note. — Our author talks well, and refinedly, like all 

 writers and planters who write and plant in a country 

 where nature has not bountifully supplied it with nat- 

 ural subjects of cultivation. But it is not so in 

 America. The ingenuity of man can conceive of 

 nothing half so grand, so varied, and so beautiful, as 

 a diversified American forest during the summer and 

 autumn. Take, for instance, the breast of one of our 

 fine hill or mountain ranges of forest, where the ever- 

 green and deciduous trees, of great variety and luxu- 

 riant growth, commingle in one broad, continued bank 

 of parti-colored verdure, at the first bursting of their 

 new leaves in the spring, and in their successive 

 growth through the summer. What delicate tints 

 wave and lift their perpetual changes, from the deep 

 blue-green of the hemlock to the poplars and beech, 

 contrasting with the silvery tints of the white maple, 



