The Philosophy of Rural Taste 153 



unconstrained. The art of laying out gardens consists, 

 therefore, in combining cheerfulness of prospect, luxuriance 

 and growth, shade, retirement and repose; so that the rural 

 aspect may produce an illusion. Variety, which is the chief 

 merit in the natural landscape, must be sought by the choice 

 of ground, with alternation of hill' and dale, ilowing streams 

 and lakes, covered with aquatic plants. Symmetry is 

 wearisome, and a garden where every thing betrays con- 

 straint and art becomes tedious and distasteful." 



We shall seek in vain, in the treatises of modern writers, 

 for a theory of rural taste more concise and satisfactory 

 than this of the Chinese landscape garden. 



Looking at this instinctive love of nature as a national 

 characteristic, which belongs almost exclusively to distinct 

 races, Humboldt asserts, that while the "profoundest feeling 

 of nature speaks forth in the earliest poetry of the Hebrews, 

 the Indians, and the Semitic and Indo-Germanic nations, it 

 is comparatively wanting in the works of the Greeks and 

 Romans." 



"In Grecian art," says he, "all is made to concentrate 

 within the sphere of human life and feeling. The descrip- 

 tion of nature, in her manifold diversity, as a distinct 

 branch of poetic literature, \vas altogether foreign to the 

 ideas of the Greeks. With them, the landscape is always 

 the mere background of a picture, in the foreground 

 of \vhich human figures are moving. Passion, breaking 

 forth in action, invited their attention almost exclusively; 

 the agitation of politics, and a life passed chiefly in public, 

 withdrew men's minds from enthusiastic absorption in the 

 tranquil pursuit of nature." 



On the other hand, the poetry of Britain, from a very 

 early period, has been especially remarkable for the deep 

 and instinctive love of natural beauty which it exhibits. 

 And here lies the explanation of the riddle of the superiority 

 of English taste in rural embellishment; that people en- 

 joying their gardens the more as they embodied the spirit 

 of nature, while the Italians, like the Greeks, enjoyed them 

 the more as they embodied the spirit of art. 



