Hints to Rural Improvers 185 



country-seat as the best ultimatum of his laborious days in 

 the counting-house. The most indefatigable statesman 

 dates, in his retirement, from his "Ashland," or his "Linden- 

 wold." Webster has his "Marshfield," where his scientific 

 agriculture is no less admirable than his profound eloquence 

 in the Senate. Taylor's well ordered plantation is not less 

 significant of the man, than the battle of Buena Vista. 

 Washington Irving's cottage, on the Hudson, is even more 

 poetical than any chapter of his Sketch Book; and Cole, 

 the greatest of our landscape painters, had his rural home 

 under the very shadow of the Catskills. 



This is well. In the United States, nature and domestic 

 life are better than society and the manners of towns. 

 Hence all sensible men gladly escape, earlier or later, and 

 partially or wholly, from the turmoil of the cities. Hence 

 the dignity and value of country life is every day augment- 

 ing. And hence the enjoyment of landscape or ornamental 

 gardening - - which, \vhen in pure taste, may properly be 

 called a more refined kind of nature, - - is every day be- 

 coming more and more widely diffused. 



Those who are not as conversant as ourselves with the 

 statistics of horticulture and rural architecture, have no 

 just idea of the rapid multiplication of pretty cottages and 

 villas in many parts of North America. The vast \veb of 

 railroads which no\v interlaces the continent, though really 

 built for the purposes of trade, cannot wholly escape doing 

 some duty for the Beautiful as w T ell as the Useful. Hun- 

 dreds and thousands, formerly obliged to live in the crowded 

 streets of cities, now find themselves able to enjoy a country 

 cottage, several miles distant, the old notions of time and 

 space being half annihilated; and these suburban cottages 

 enable the busy citizen to breathe freely, and keep alive 

 his love for nature, till the time shall come w T hen he shall 

 have wrung out of the nervous hand of commerce enough 

 means to enable him to realize his ideal of the "retired 

 life" of an American landed proprietor. 



The number of our country residences which are laid out, 

 and kept at a high point of ornamental gardening, is cer- 



