LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 269 



a more impressive as well as a more beautiful pile than 

 Mount Washington, which out-tops it by fifteen hun- 

 dred feet. In my own Berkshire Hills, Mount Everett 

 (or The Dome, as it is popularly called), in the south- 

 western corner of Massachusetts, is nearly one thousand 

 feet lower than Gray lock, in the northwestern; yet as 

 you view it from the plain below it seems far more like a 

 major mountain, it actually suggests size and dignity 

 and eternal solidity to a much greater extent, because 

 it rises in a beautiful and perfect dome out of the long 

 rampart of the range and lays a majestic curve against 

 the western sky, a curve as sweet as that of a woman's 

 breast, as infinite as the sea rim. 



Man, of course, has used the dome in his structures 

 since the days of the Romans, undaunted by its diffi- 

 culties; Brunelleschi, Michael Angelo, Wren wrestled 

 with its problems in later times; and to-day it is a symbol 

 of the enduring solidity of the state. Man's domes are 

 sprung more sharply than Nature's, however, and the 

 long, sweet curve of infinity is almost lost in them. 

 Oddly enough, where that curve is most happily caught 

 in an architectural structure is in the span of the old 

 Brooklyn Bridge, springing out of the flank of lower 

 Manhattan, the most architecturally chaotic section of 

 the globe ! The newer bridges upstream have missed it, 

 but the air-flung boulevard of the first great suspension 

 structure rises and hovers and dips with the alluring, 

 solemn, and lovely span of the infinite. 



