THE PHILOSOPHY OF RURAL TASTE. 103 



should make men amends for living at a distance from what would 

 be their more congenial and agreeable dwelling-place in the midst 

 of nature, free and unconstrained. The art of laying out gardens 

 consists, therefore, in combining cheerfulness of prospect, luxuriance 

 of growth, shade, retirement and repose ; so that the rural aspect 

 may produce an illusion. Variety, which is the chief merit in the 

 natural landscape, must be sought by the choice of ground, with 

 alternation of hill and dale, flowing streams and lakes, covered with 

 aquatic plants. Symmetry is wearisome; and a garden where 

 every thing betrays constraint and art, becomes tedious and distaste- 

 ful? 



We shall seek in vain, in the treatises of modern writers, for a 

 theory of rural taste more concise and satisfactory than this of the 

 Chinese landscape garden. 



Looking at this instinctive love of nature as a national charac- 

 teristic, which belongs almost exclusively to distinct races, Hum- 

 boldt asserts, that while the " profoundest feeling of nature speaks 

 forth in the earliest poetry of the Hebrews, the Indians, and the Se- 

 mitic and Indo-Germanic nations, it is comparatively wanting in 

 the works of the Greeks and Romans." 



" In Grecian art," says he, " all is made to concentrate within 

 the sphere of human life and feeling. The description of nature, in 

 her manifold diversity, as a distinct branch of poetic literature, was 

 altogether foreign to the ideas of the Greeks. With them, the 

 landscape is always the mere background of a picture, in the fore- 

 ground of which human figures are moving. Passion, breaking 

 forth in action, invited their attention almost exclusively ; the agita- 

 tion of politics, and a life passed chiefly in public, withdrew men's 

 minds from enthusiastic absorption in the tranquil pursuit of 

 nature." 



On the other hand, the poetry of Britain, from a very early 

 period, has been especially remarkable for the deep and instinctive 

 love of natural beauty which it exhibits. And here lies the explana- 

 tion of the riddle of the superiority of English taste in rural embel- 

 lishment ; that people enjoying their gardens the more as they 

 embodied the spirit of nature, while the Italians, like the Greeks, 

 enjoyed them the more as they embodied the spirit of art. 



