Critique oh the October nunibcr. 79 



beauty. Avoid islands in a pond, for they immediately convey the 

 artificial communion of uncultivated taste. 



In conclusion, we would remark, that trees are the important featuresiu 

 creating either landscape or waterscape beauty. They are beautiful when 

 their swelling buds disclose nests of tiny leaves in spring or the brighter 

 green of expanded foliage in midsummer, or when the mellow and 

 warm tints of autumn hang them with ruby colors mixed with topaz, 

 supplanting the emerald of the season gone, by bright shades that con- 

 trast with orange-tinted clouds — Heaven's curtains ; and as the glance 

 wanders over empurpled lawns, with here and there refreshing spots of 

 green, protected and screened from chilling frost by overarching trees, 

 commingling odors of summer's last flowers, wafted by soft breezes, 

 invigorate our more corporeal sense. Birds that dolefully chirp their 

 farewell song in strains of sorrowful warning, as if regretting the maize 

 and the rill ; the giant oak, the refreshing leaves which have warded 

 off the noonday heat, and that other tree, sacred to bird memory, 

 which witnessed the advent of the three little ones, and offered a home 

 with convenient crotch on which to found a nest where maternal solici- 

 tude cared for the wants of future warblers. Standing on some ambitious 

 acclivity ; as far as the glance reaches, the eye is regaled with slopes bo 

 gentle, hills precipitous, terminating far beyond in the blue mountains, 

 until their peaks are lost br blending with the bluer sky. 



CRITIQUE ON THE OCTOBER N'UMBEK. 



r. Y E V E L T N . 



Your Leader. — Thanks, Mr. Editor, for your able though good-humored 

 expose of a few of the absurdities of the professional landscape makers — 

 I would sav mariers — nine-tenths of whom, I ver'.ly believe, if entrusted 

 with the adornment of some unfortunfite victim's estate, and left to the 

 consummation of their peculiar ideas of beauty, would arm themselves 

 with theodolites, levels, spades, mattocks, and all the rest of their mysti- 

 cal enginery of devastation, and deliberately grade, pave and fence him 

 in; put an iron railing round his lawn, and educate platoons of trees to 

 niarcli in Indian file across liis parks and down his avenues; then, after 

 j>ersuading the luckless proprietor that their exertions had achieved a 



