188 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



their moral benefit. While penning this account, I hear, with 

 extreme regret, that the Botanical Garden in Boston, a city so 

 eminent for its public spirit and beneficence, is to be strangled in 

 its infancy, and abandoned ; and that the ground is likely to be 

 appropriated to buildings, so that the rich prospect of the charm 

 ing environs of the city is to be shut out, and the fresh and salu 

 brious breezes from the verdant fields and hills of the surrounding 

 country are to be debarred an entrance for the refreshment of the 

 inhabitants of this busy and crowded mart ; and even the sight 

 of the glorious western sky, which, with its gilded, and glowing, 

 and gorgeous drapery, I have made, at evening, a pilgrimage, many 

 hundreds of times, to contemplate and adore, is to be excluded by 

 high walls of brick and stone. Should this be done ? and how 

 can such an injury, if once committed, be repaired ? Surely they 

 will forgive one of their own children, whom no distance of place 

 and no length of absence can estrange from his honored and 

 revered birthplace, in saying that even one half of the expense 

 thrown away upon public dinners and parade, would secure to 

 them permanent provisions for health, instruction, comfort, and 

 delight, whose value no pecuniary standard can measure, and 

 which can never be duly appreciated, but by those who have 

 enjoyed and have then been deprived of them. 



