394 Landscape Gardening 



always in such cases, of a nature whose development craved 

 the most generous sympathy: these few years, too, cast 

 among all the charms of a landscape which the Fishkill 

 hills lifted from littleness, and the broad river inspired with 

 a kind of grandeur; years, which the universal silence of 

 the country, always so imposing to young imaginations, 

 and the rainbow pomp of the year, as it came and went up 

 and down the river-banks and over the mountains, and the 

 general solitude of country life, were not very likely to 

 enliven. Before, lay a career of hard work in a pursuit 

 which rarely enriches the workman, with little apparent 

 promise of leisure to pursue his studies or to follow his 

 tastes. It is natural enough, that in the midst of such 

 prospects, the boy, delicately organized to appreciate his 

 position, should have gone to his recitations and his play in 

 a very silent - - if not stern - - manner, all the more reserved 

 and silent for the firm resolution to master and not be 

 mastered. It is hard to fancy that he was ever a blithe 

 boy. The gravity of maturity came early upon him. Those 

 who saw him only in later years can, probably, easily see 

 the boy at Montgomery Academy, by fancying him quite as 

 they knew him, less twenty or twenty-five years. One by 

 one, the boys went from the academy to college, or into 

 business, and when Andrew was sixteen years old, he also 

 left the academy and returned home. 



He, too, had been hoping to go to college; but the family 

 means forbade. His mother, anxious to see him early set- 

 tled, urged him, as his elder brothers were both doing well 

 in business - - the one as a nurseryman, and the other, who 

 had left the comb factory, practising ably and prosper- 

 ously as a physician - - to enter as a clerk into a drygoods 

 store. That request explains the want of delight with which 

 he remembered his childhood: because it shows that his 

 good, kind mother, in the midst of her baking, and boiling, 

 and darning the children's stockings, made no allowance - 

 as how should she, not being able to perceive them - - for 

 the possibly very positive tastes of her boy. Besides, the 

 first duty of each member of the poor household was, as she 



