324 STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



into a beautifully even and rounded lawn. The wood 

 anemone, the mouse-ear, and the saxifrage no longer 

 spangled the grassy slope in early spring, nor the aster 

 nor the golden-rod stood there to welcome the arrival 

 of autumn. But tulips grew proudly in a fanciful bor 

 der of spaded earth, under the side windows in the 

 opening of the year, and verbenas, portulaccas, and cal 

 ceolarias outshone all the native summer beauties of the 

 landscape. 



Surrounding the field that adjoined the cottage was 

 an old stonewall, gray with lichens and covered with 

 numerous wild vines that had clustered round it, as the 

 ivy intwines itself round the walls of ruined castles 

 and abbeys in the old world. The clematis over 

 shadowed it with flowers and foliage in summer, and 

 with its beautiful silken down in the fall of the year ; 

 and the celastrus grew with it side by side, offering its 

 honeyed flowers to the bee, and its scarlet, bitter-sweet 

 berries to the hand of the simpler, or to the famishing 

 winter birds. Among this vinery the summer warblers 

 built their nests ; and numbers of them were revealed 

 to sight, when the foliage was swept away by the late 

 autumnal winds. 



The ladies of the mansion would not readily consent 

 to the removal of this old stonewall, with its various 

 rustic appurtenances, which seemed to them a part of 

 the original charms of the place ; but they were soon 

 convinced that the villa ought not to stand in the midst 

 of such shabby " surroundings." They were plied with 

 arguments drawn from the works of men who had 

 studied nature in the galleries of art, and through the 

 medium of canvas, and were persuaded to believe that 

 the principles of English landscape gardening must 

 never be sacrificed to the crude notions of a poetic 



