General Principles 99 



pleases him and endeavor to understand how and why it 

 influences his mind. By thus filling his brain with number- 

 less beautiful little pictures or images, and his intellect with 

 the foundations and sources of pleasure in his art, he will 

 come from nature doubly primed to give practical utterance 

 to his imaginings, and prepared to embody in a composition 

 the finer touches and more artistic and spiritual elements 

 which he has collected from such a variety of sources. It is 

 in this way that the imitation of nature will be but the ennob- 

 ling of art, — the airy elegance and flying graces of the one being 

 engrafted on the more substantial characteristics of the other. 



22. Beauty. — That beauty should be the ultimate aim 

 of every operation in landscape gardening, may seem so self- 

 evident a proposition as almost to excite a smile. It is one, 

 however, which I must not fail to enforce. There may be 

 different opinions as to what constitutes beauty, and of what 

 ingredients it is made up, some affirming that its chief ele- 

 ments are those of form, and others that it consists solely in 

 association. I shall assume that it is to be found in both. 



Most persons will be agreed, in the main, as to what is really 

 beautiful, though almost every one will have some kinds of 

 favoritism and prejudice. Considering the multitudinous 

 forms of vegetable life and the fact that all are endowed with 

 more or less attractiveness, I have often been struck with the 

 narrowness of affection for plants which is commonly pos- 

 sessed, many people having a few favorite trees or shrubs 

 and proscribing nearly all others. I have been told of a cele- 

 brated landscape gardener who always kept the nurserymen's 

 stock of two or three particular trees at the lowest ebb, and 

 could never get enough. And it is matter of gardening his- 

 tory, what thousands — probably millions — of his famous 

 "locust-trees" Cobbett spread abroad throughout the coun- 

 try, — although it is now well understood that, for all prac- 



