104 THE FIELD AND THE GARDEN. 



splendor is a thing to be admired, or simplicity a thing to 

 be ridiculed. A true painter sees more to delight him in 

 a laborer's cottage guarded by an old apple-tree, than in 

 a palace surrounded by works of sculpture and shaded by 

 cedars of Lebanon. 



There is an inclination among men to carry their social 

 prejudices into their observations of nature, to make price 

 a criterion of beauty as well as of value, and to qualify 

 their admiration of both scenes and flowers by their ideas 

 of the expense which has been laid out upon them. This is 

 the way to annihilate everything sacred and poetical in 

 the character of flowers and landscape, and to degrade 

 nature below art, or, rather, I should say, below fashion. 

 The simple-hearted woman who cherishes with fondness 

 a lilac-tree that bore flowers for her when she was a girl, 

 manifests a sentiment that is entitled to respect, and her 

 affection for it is a genuine theme for poetry. He who 

 despises her attachment because her lilac-tree is out of 

 date as a thing of fashion, and has lost its value in the 

 flower-market, is himself the proper subject of satire. Let 

 us save these fair objects of the field and the garden from 

 being appraised like millinery goods ! 



