AMERICAX LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. 117 



a vulgar claim to make for it; but Aristotle said that any object to 

 be beautiful must have a certain magnitude. ^Microscopic views, 

 strictly speaking, cannot be beautiful. But height and depth and 

 space in a landscape mean vastly more than in a statue, a painting, 

 or a piece of music. A mountain cannot be a mountain till it is a 

 thousand feet high, and if a river is not large enough it may be 

 mistaken for a brook. I like Champlain better than Lake George 

 chiefly because Champlain is larger. The plains of Kansas and 

 Texas are magnificent for their illimitable unbroken stretch. The 

 great passes of the Rockies lift our souls out of our puny bodies 

 just by virtue of the sheer, stupendous height of the encircling 

 mountains. Yes, mere largeness has its aesthetic value. Size 

 counts. 



The American landscape is wild. In many places it is truly 

 savage. Here and there it has all the fierce tempestuous wildness 

 of th.e god-like conflict in which the world was made. Xo one can 

 compare England with America, for example, without seeing that 

 the English landscape is cultivated, subdued, humanized, in a sense 

 overcome by the operations of man. The German forests are 

 ordered like gardens and look no more like the riotous wilds of 

 Canada or Minnesota than a chess-board looks like a battlefield. 

 To be sure there is some subjugation of the landscape in America, 

 and apt to be more; but the great reaches of American lake and 

 mountain must stand eternally above the encroachments of man. 

 They will forever express, more perfectly than other landscapes, 

 the gigantic forces of creation. 



Again, the American landscape is diverse. There are all kinds of 

 scenery on our continent. There are big, threatening mountains, 

 and quiet, peaceful, little ones; there are broad seas; there are vast 

 fertile plains; there are noble rivers and gurgling, gossiping brooks; 

 there are pine forests and palmetto groves. Switzerland has one 

 sort of scenery; Holland another; England still another; America 

 has all kinds. 



But more than diversity the American landscape has versatility. 

 ^ye complain sometimes of our changeable weather and our ex- 

 tremes of climate, but these extremes are responsible in part for 

 the kaleidoscopic transformations of our fields and hills. In a great 

 German text book of botany I saw printed with infinite pains a 



