192 Landscape Gardening 



the contemplation of the Beautiful in Nature. Genius is 

 proud and free; genius creates and reconstructs." 



He, therefore (whether as amateur or professor), who 

 hopes to be successful in the highest degree, in the arts of 

 relined building or landscape gardening, must possess not 

 only taste to appreciate the beautiful, but genius to produce 

 it. Do we not often see persons who have for half their 

 lives enjoyed a reputation for correct taste, suddenly lose 

 it when they attempt to embody it in some practical man- 

 ner? Such persons have only the "indolent and passive," 

 and not the "free and creative faculty." Yet there are a 

 thousand little offices of supervision and control, where the 

 taste alone may be exercised with the happiest results 

 upon a country place. It is by no means a small merit to 

 prevent any violations of good taste, if we cannot achieve 

 any great work of genius. And we are happy to be able 

 to say that we know many amateurs in this country who 

 unite with a refined taste a creative genius, or practical 

 ability to carry beautiful improvements into execution, 

 which has already enriched the country with beautiful ex- 

 amples of rural residences; and we can congratulate our- 

 selves that, along with other traits of the Anglo-Saxon 

 mind, we have by no means failed in our inheritance of 

 that fine appreciation of rural beauty, and the power of 

 developing it, which the English have so long possessed. 



We hope the number of those who are able to enjoy this 

 most refined kind of happiness will every day grow more and 

 more numerous; and that it may do so, we are confident we 

 can give no better advice than again to commend beginners, 

 before they lay a corner stone, or plant a tree, to visit and 

 study at least a dozen or twenty of the acknowledged best 

 specimens of good taste in America. 



