CHAPTER XXXVI 



//OU r TO POPULARIZE THE TASTE FOR 



PLANTING * 



HOW to popularize that taste for rural beauty which 

 gives to every beloved home in the country its 

 greatest outward charm and to the country itself 

 its highest attraction is a question which must often occur 

 to many of our readers. A traveller never journeys through 

 England without lavishing all the epithets of admiration on 

 the rural beauty of that gardenesque country; and his 

 praises are as justly due to the wayside cottages of the 

 humble laborers (whose pecuniary condition of life is far 

 below that of our numerous small householders) as to the 

 great palaces and villas. Perhaps the loveliest and most 

 fascinating of the cottage homes, of which Mrs. Hemans has 

 so touchingly sung, are the clergymen's dwellings in that 

 country; dwellings, for the most part, of very moderate 

 size, and no greater cost than are common in all the most 

 thriving and populous parts of the Union, but which, owing 

 to the love of horticulture and the taste for something above 

 the merely useful which characterizes their owners as a 

 class, are for the most part radiant with the bloom and em- 

 bellishment of the loveliest flowers and shrubs. 



The contrast with the comparatively naked and neglected 

 country dwellings that are the average rural tenements of 

 our country at large is very striking. Undoubtedly this is 

 in part owing to the fact that it takes a longer time, as 

 Lord Bacon said a century ago, "to garden finely than to 

 build stately." But the newness of our civilization is not 

 sufficient apology. If so we should be spared the exhibition 

 of gay carpets, fine mirrors and furniture in the "front 

 parlor," of many a mechanic's, working-man's, and farmer's 



* Original date of July, 1852. 

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