CHAPTER XXVIII 

 A CHAPTER ON LA\YNS* 



LANDSCAPE GARDENING embraces, in the circle 

 of its perfections many elements of beauty certainly 

 not a less number than the modern chemists count 

 as the simplest conditions of matter. But with something 

 of the feeling of the old philosophers, who believed that 

 earth, air, fire and water, included everything in nature, we 

 like to go back to plain and simple facts of breadth and 

 importance enough to embrace a multitude of little details. 

 The great elements then, of landscape gardening, as we 

 understand it, are trees and grass. 



Trees -- delicate, beautiful, grand, or majestic trees - 

 pliantly answering to the wooing of the softest west wind, 

 like the willow; or bravely and sturdily defying centuries 

 of storm and tempest, like the oak - - they are indeed the 

 great "princes, potentates, and people," of our realm of 

 beauty. But it is not to-day that we are permitted to sing 

 triumphal songs in their praise. 



In behalf of the grass - - the turf, the lawn, - - then, we 

 ask our readers to listen to us for a short time. And by this 

 we do not mean to speak of it in a moral sense, as did the 

 inspired preacher of old, when he gravely told us that "all 

 ilesh is grass;" or in a style savoring of the vanities of 

 costume, as did Prior, when he wrote the couplet, 



"Those limbs in lawn and softest silk arrayed, 

 From sunbeams guarded, and of winds afraid." 



Or with the keen relish of the English jockey whose only 

 idea of "the turf" is that of the place nature has specially 

 provided him upon which to race horses. 



* Original date of November, 1846. 

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