HINTS TO RURAL IMPROVERS. Ill 



his scientific agriculture is no less admirable than his profound elo- 

 quence in the Senate. Taylor's well-ordered plantation is not less 

 significant of the man, than the battle of Buena Vista. Washing- 

 ton Irving's cottage, on the Hudson, is even more poetical than any 

 chapter of his Sketch Book ; and Cole, the greatest of our landscape 

 painters, had his rural home under the very shadow of the Catskills. 



This is well. In the United States, nature and domestic life are 

 better than society and the manners of towns. Hence all sensible 

 men gladly escape, earlier or later, and partially or wholly, from the 

 turmoil of the cities. Hence the dignity and value of country life 

 is every day augmenting. And hence the enjoyment of landscape 

 or ornamental gardening which, when in pure taste, may properly 

 be called a more refined kind of nature, is every day becoming 

 more and more widely diffused. 



Those who are not as conversant as ourselves with the statistics 

 of horticulture and rural architecture, have no just idea of the rapid 

 multiplication of pretty cottages and villas in many parts of North 

 America. The vast web of railroads which now interlaces the con- 

 tinent, though really built for the purposes of trade, cannot wholly 

 escape doing some duty for the Beautiful as weh 1 as the Useful. 

 Hundreds and thousands, formerly obliged to live in the crowded 

 streets of cities, now find themselves able to enjoy a country cottage, 

 several miles distant, the old notions of time and space being half 

 annihilated ; and these suburban cottages enable the busy citizen to 

 breathe freely, and keep alive his love for nature, titi the time shall 

 come when he shall have wrung out of the nervous hand of com- 

 merce enough means to enable him to realize his ideal of the " re- 

 tired life" of an American landed proprietor. 



The number of our country residences which are laid out, and 

 kept at a high point of ornamental gardening, is certainly not very 

 large, though it is continually increasing. But we have no hesita- 

 tion in saying that the aggregate sum annually expended in this 

 way for the last five years, in North America, is not exceeded in any 

 country in the world save one. 



England ranks before all other countries in the perfection of its 

 landscape gardening ; and enormous, almost incredible sums have 

 been expended by her wealthier class upon their rural improvements. 



