408 Landscape Gardening 



very little ear; and often when his wife read to him any 

 peculiarly beautiful or touching passage from a book, he 

 was quite unable to speak, so much was he mastered by his 

 emotion. Besides this delicacy of organization, which makes 

 aristocrats of all who have it, the sharp contrast between his 

 childhood and his mature life doubtlessly nourished a kind 

 of mental protest against the hard discomforts, want of 

 sympathy, and misunderstandings of poverty. 



I recall but one place in which he deliberately states this 

 instinct of his, as an opinion. In the paper upon " Improve- 

 ment of Vegetable Races," April, 1852, he says: 'We are 

 not going to be led into a physiological digression on the 

 subject of the inextinguishable rights of a superior organiza- 

 tion in certain men, and races of men, which Nature every 

 day reaffirms, notwithstanding the socialistic and demo- 

 cratic theories of our politicians." But this statement only 

 asserts the difference of organization. No man was a truer 

 American than Downing; no man more opposed to all kinds 

 of recognition of that difference in intellectual organization 

 by a difference of social rank. That he considered to be the 

 true democracy which asserted the absolute equality of 

 opportunity; -- and, therefore, he writes from Warwick 

 Castle, a place which in every way could charm no man more 

 than him: "but I turned my face at last westward toward 

 my native land, and with uplifted eyes thanked the good 

 God that, though to England, the country of my ancestors, it 

 had been given to show the growth of man in his highest 

 development of class or noble, to America has been reserved 

 the greater blessing of solving for the world the true problem 

 of ail humanity, - - that of the abolition of all castes, and the 

 recognition of the divine rights of every human soul." On 

 that May morning, in the library, I remember the conver- 

 sation, drifting from subject to subject, touched an essay 

 upon "Manners," by Mr. Emerson, then recently published; 

 and in the few words that Mr. Downing said, lay the germ of 

 what I gradually discovered to be his feeling upon the sub- 

 ject. This hauteur was always evident in his personal in- 

 tercourse. In his dealings with workmen, with publishers, 



