198 THE SENTIMENT OF ANTIQUITY. 



more regard for the preservation of any object that derives 

 value from imagination or sentiment. If there be a dozen 

 persons in a village who would save from threatened de- 

 struction an old building or a venerable grove, these few 

 are chiefly of the fair sex. The regard we feel for such 

 things is generally proportioned to our culture; not to 

 our intellectual power, which is quite another thing. But 

 men of active and practical habits are prone to despise 

 a sentiment that lies too deep for their sensibility, and 

 refuse to preserve any relic of the past that will not 

 improve the commercial value of their own property. 

 The wanton sacrifice of trees is often condemned in con- 

 nection with the building of new roads. But trees are 

 not the only valuable objects in a natural landscape. The 

 spade and tile pickaxe may do more injury than the 

 axe of the woodman to the face of the country, and of a 

 kind that is irreparable. Collections of shrubbery upon 

 certain picturesque eminences, fern-clad rocks projecting 

 from the brow of a hill and overhanging the roadside, 

 have the charm of venerable ruins joined with the fresh- 

 ness, of living vegetation. By grading all these to one 

 dead level or slope, the scene is despoiled of its beauty 

 and deprived of its picturesque associations. 



It has often been asserted that the scenery to which 

 men have been accustomed from their youth produces an 

 effect on their character corresponding with its state of 

 rudeness or cultivation, its tame and smooth or abrupt 

 and mountainous surface. The influences of society, 

 however, must greatly counterbalance these effects, which 

 are, after all, very problematical It is hard to believe 

 that the wild scenes of nature would turn men into sav- 

 ages, except as they deprive them of education and of 

 intercourse with civilized people. On the other hand, it 

 will be admitted that they encourage, by their peaceful 

 solitudes, any meditative habit of mind which certain 



