216 Landscape Gardening 



between maintaining a chancery suit, or keeping on pleas- 

 ant terms with your best friend or favorite country neigh- 

 bor. Open walks must be scrupulously neat, and broad 

 sunshine and rich soil make weeds grow faster than a new 

 city in the best "western diggins," and your gardener has 

 no sooner put the series of walks in perfect order than he 

 looks over his shoulder and beholds the enemy is there to be 

 conquered over again. On the other hand woodland walks 

 are swept and repaired in the spring, and like some of those 

 gifted individuals, "born neat," they require no more atten- 

 tion than the rainbow to remain fresh and bright till the 

 autumn leaves begin to drop again. 



Our citizen reader, therefore, who wishes to enjoy his 

 country seat as an elegant sylvan retreat with the greatest 

 amount of beauty and enjoyment and the smallest care 

 and expenditure will choose a place naturally well wooded, 

 or where open glades and bits of lawn alternate with masses 

 or groups, and, it may be, with extensive tracts of well- 

 grown wood. A house once erected on such a site, the 

 whole can very easily be turned into a charming labyrinth 

 of beautiful and secluded drives and walks. And as our 

 improver cultivates his eye and his taste, nature will cer- 

 tainly give him fresh hints; she will tell him how by open- 

 ing a glade here, and piercing a thicket there, by making 

 underwood occasionally give place to soft turf, so as to 

 show fine trunks to the greatest advantage, and thereby 

 bringing into more complete contrast some wilder and more 

 picturesque dell, all the natural charms of a place may be 

 heightened into a beauty far more impressive and significant 

 than they originally possessed. 



Why man's perception of the Beautiful seems clouded 

 over in most uncultivated natures and is only brought out 

 by a certain process of refining and mental culture, as the 

 lapidary brings out, by polishing, all the rich play of colors 

 in a stone that one passes by as a common pebble, we leave to 

 the metaphysicians to explain. Certain it is that we see oc- 

 casionally lamentable proofs of the fact in the treatment of 

 nature's best features, by her untutored children. More than 



