LOVE OF THE LANDSCAPE 355 



great six-masted schooners with their sawlike sky lines ; the 

 tugs followed by their chain of sluggish coal barges; and the 

 fast-sailing yachts that skim the water at stated seasons, all 

 gave a far-off animation that called for no expenditure of emo- 

 tion, yet at the same time kept the outgoing thought busily 

 travelling from the Azores to the coal-pits of Pennsylvania. 



Not content with the purely scientific aspect of nature, 

 there was hardly any such aspect for one whose province it was 

 to humanize a scientific fact as soon as he grasped it, he ap- 

 propriated the beauty of the landscape superimposed upon the 

 skeleton of geological history, making it a part of his every-day 

 life. It was his habit to experiment as to the best way of gain- 

 ing a sense of the beauty and significance of any scene with 

 which he was brought into intimate contact. He believed that 

 " he who would become a lover of the landscape must accustom 

 himself to seek it alone, and must learn to know that his mere 

 presence at its doors will not make him free to its treasures." 

 As a result of experiment he further became convinced that 

 knowledge may vastly enhance the intensity of aesthetic im- 

 pressions. "The evidence of the slow changes which have 

 brought the bit of earth to its existing form, which have shaped 

 the face which it turns to the eyes of man, has to be gained," 

 he says, " by deliberate inquiry, so that the reading is that of a 

 great volume in its difficulty and in the time it demands." He 

 thought much upon this subject, lectured on it to the students 

 in the Architectural School, and left many pages of unpub- 

 lished material relating to it. Able himself to bring an informed 

 intelligence to the observation of the ocean, hills, and plains, 

 his enjoyment of their beauty was proportionally keen. Grand- 

 eur of scenery, however, never took strong hold upon him. It 

 was the gentler scenes, linked with human interest, that pleased 

 him most the places where homes had been or might be, or 

 where great deeds had been enacted. "There are," he says, 

 " many landscapes in the unhistoric wildernesses endowed with 

 a far greater share of purely natural beauty than that of the 



