1 66 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES. 



I have alluded to the possibility of artistic land- 

 scape treatment in connection with farm-lands ; this 

 opinion is, I am aware, opposed to the traditional 

 theory of the British writers upon the subject ; but 

 we are living in advance of a good many traditions 

 of that sort. The Duke of Marlborough keeps the 

 open glades of his park-land short and velvety by his 

 herd of fallow deer. Our wealthy citizen, on the 

 other hand, will probably keep his largest stretch of 

 level land in presentable condition with a Buckeye 

 Mower, and will depend upon the cutting as a win- 

 ter's baiting for his Alderney heifers ; but this will 

 not forbid an occasional group of oaks or maples, or 

 the massing of some graceful shrubbery around an 

 intruding cliff. It will never do, indeed, for us as 

 Americans to sanction the divorce of landscape from 

 our humbler rural intentions else the great bulk of 

 our wayside will be left without law of improvement. 

 Not only those broad and striking effects which 

 belong to a great range of field and wood, or to bold 

 scenery, come within the domain of landscape art, but 

 those lesser and orderly graces that may be com- 

 passed within stone's throw of a man's door. We do 

 not measure an artist by the width of his canvas. 

 The panoramas that take in mountains are well, if the 

 life and the mists of the mountains are in them ; but 

 they do not blind us to the merit of a cabinet gem. 



