The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



something of the spirit of the landscape. This is 

 obviously something much harder to define or de- 

 scribe. I cannot say to every man, lo, here is the 

 spirit of the woods ! or look now at the water where 

 you shall behold the naked spirit of the lake. 



Nevertheless there is a spirit of the woods and 

 a spirit of the lake, and the spiritually minded per- 

 son will certainly discern them. Even the dullest 

 man has so much of the divine essence in him that 

 he cannot wholly escape it. He may look on with 

 the cow at the same fields and views, and though 

 she gets her dinner from them he will get some- 

 thing more and different. 



It is plain, furthermore, that this spiritual or 

 emotional product of the landscape takes a spe- 

 cific quality from its physical form. The emotions 

 communicated to the human heart from the ocean 

 are not the same as those given by the brook. Our 

 spirits are moved in one way by the pine forest and 

 in a very different way by the prairies. The bank 

 of blue blossoming lupines means one thing to us 

 and the thundering waterfall means quite another. 

 Yet these spiritual, emotional products can hardly 



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