332 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



the testimony of our countryman, Washington Irving, in one 

 of his most elegant essays. "The taste of the English in the 

 cultivation of land, and in what is called Landscape Garden- 

 ing, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and 

 discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and har- 

 monious combinations. Those charms vi-hich in other coun- 

 tries she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled around 

 the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her 

 coy and furtive graces, and spread them like witchery about 

 their rural abodes. Nothing can be more imposing than the 

 magnificence of English park scenery. Vast lawns that extend 

 like sheets of vivid green, with here and there, clumps of gi- 

 gantic trees heaping up rich piles of foliage. The solemn 

 group of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping 

 in silent herds across them ; the hare bounding away to the 

 covert, or the pheasant bursting suddenly upon the wing. 

 The brook, taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand 

 into a glassy lake, — the sequestered pool reflecting the quiv- 

 ering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping upon its bosom, and 

 the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters ; while 

 some rustic temple or sylvan statue, grown green and dark 

 with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion." 



" These are but a few of the features of park scenery ; but 

 what most delights me, is the creative talent with which the 

 English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life_ 

 The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty por- 

 tion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of taste, becomes 

 a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye he seizes 

 at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the fu- 

 ture landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under 

 his hand ; and yet the operations of art which produce the 

 effect are scarcely to be perce;ved ; the cherisiiing and train- 



