The Beautiful in Ground I.7.) 



This is a fearful fallacy, however; fearful, oftentimes, to 

 both the eye and the purse. If a dead level were the thing 

 needful to constitute beauty of surface, then all Holland 

 would be the Arcadia of landscape painters; and while 

 Claude, condemned to tame Italy, would have painted the 

 interior of inns, and groups of boors drinking (vide the 

 Dutch School of art), Teniers, living in the dead level of 

 his beautiful nature, would have bequeathed to the world 

 pictures of his native land, full of the loveliness of meadows 

 smooth as a carpet, or enlivened only by pollard willows and 

 stagnant canals. It is not the less fearful to see, as we have 

 often seen in this country, where new places are continually 

 made, a finely varied outline of ground utterly spoiled by 

 being graded for the mansion and its surrounding lawn, at 

 an expense which would have curved all the walks, and 

 filled the grounds with the finest trees and shrubs, if their 

 surface had been left nearly or quite as nature formed it. 

 Not much better, or even far worse, is the foolish fancy 

 many persons have of terracing every piece of sloping 

 ground, as a mere matter of ornament, where no terrace is 

 needed. It may be pretty safely said that a terrace is 

 always ugly unless it is on a large scale and is treated with 

 dignity so as to become part of the building itself, or more 

 properly be supposed to belong to it than to the grounds, 

 like the fine, architectural terraces which surround the old 

 English mansions. But little gardens thrown up into ter- 

 races, are devoid of all beauty whatever, though they may 

 often be rendered more useful or available in this way. 



The surface of ground is rarely ugly in a state of nature, 

 because all nature leans to the beautiful, and the constant 

 action of the elements goes continually to soften and wear 

 away the harshness and violence of surface. What cannot 

 be softened, is hidden and rounded by means of foliage, 

 trees and shrubs, and creeping vines, and so the tendency to 

 the curve is always greater and greater. But man often 

 forms ugly surfaces of ground, by breaking up all natural 

 curves, without recognizing their expression, by distribut- 

 ing lumps of earth here and there, by grading levels in the 



