122 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



such features of our richest and most smiling and diversified country 

 must the best hints for the embellishment of rural homes always be 

 derived. And yet it is not any portion of the woods and fields that 

 we wish our finest pleasure-ground scenery precisely to resemble. 

 We rather wish to select from jbhe finest sylvan features of nature, 

 and to recompose the materials in a choicer manner by rejecting 

 any thing foreign to the spirit of elegance and refinement which 

 should characterize the landscape of the most tasteful country resi- 

 dence a landscape in which all that is graceful and beautiful in 

 nature is preserved all her most perfect forms and most harmoni- 

 ous lines but with that added refinement which high keeping and 

 continual care confer on natural beauty, without impairing its innate 

 spirit of freedom, or the truth and freshness of its intrinsic character. 

 A planted elm of fifty years, which stands in the midst of the smooth 

 lawn before yonder mansion its long graceful branches towering 

 upwards like an antique classical vase, and then sweeping to the 

 ground with a curve as beautiful as the falling spray of a fountain, 

 has all the freedom of character of its best prototypes in the wild 

 woods, with a refinement and a perfection of symmetry which it 

 would-be next to impossible to find in a wild tree. Let us take it 

 then as the type of all true art in landscape gardening which selects 

 from natural materials that abound in any country, its best sylvan 

 features, and by giving them a better opportunity than they could 

 otherwise obtain, brings about a higher beauty of development and 

 a more perfect expression than nature itself offers. Study landscape 

 in nature more, and the gardens and their catalogues less, is our 

 advice to the rising generation of planters, who wish to embellish 

 their places in the best and purest taste. 



