PROCEEDINGS OF THE HORTICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 653 



enjoys still more the sculptor's art of g-iving beauty and grandeur to masd 

 and ibrm. In our little domain it was a new revelation to iue years ago, 

 when I began to walk at evening in our groves of cedars and maples and 

 oaks, and to note the sky-line of shadow and light which so brought out 

 their expressions. The place had a solemn, grand, cathedral look ; and 

 two or three cedars that had no particular charm in the daytime rose up 

 into romantic beauty then, and their tips seemed to be ready to volunteer 

 to be built into the walls of some old minster, in order to complete or 

 repair the work of the glorius dreamer among the builders of the ancient 

 •<imes. The landscape-gardeiier must needs be a sculptor in taste if not in 

 talent, and so arrange buildings, walks, lawns, trees, water, shrubbery and 

 a'll things in the view as to give all the true measure and proportion, and 

 bring out new power and charm under all the changing lights and shades 

 of nature. Every man of common sense practices the same art, however, 

 when little conscious of it; and he who trains a woodbine upon a stately 

 tree, or an ivy upon a solid wall, belongs to the illustrious craft that ranks 

 Phidias and Michael Angelo among its princes. He is a sculptor not in 

 dead wood or brass or stone, but in materials quite as ready to obey the 

 call of taste and imagination, and give those elfects of form and light and 

 shade that lend the handiwork of the chisel its power and charm. 



And who shall tell the capacities of the garden for the painter's art, with 

 its display of fia'ure, color, and perspective. Landscape gardening is land- 

 scape painting, with a stouter instrument than the pencil, indeed, and with 

 richer and more living colors than any on the pallet. It may be that the 

 material is so near at hand, and often so ample as to leave little to the 

 invention of art; and he sometimes treats nature most generously who most 

 scrupulously lets her alone in beauty unadorned, and thus adorned the 

 most. But generally the loveliest ground needs clearing and arranging. 

 In fact, rural art is never so perfect as when it brings out nature; and 

 culture of the soil, as of the soul, reveals the fairest of its capacities, and 

 lights up tlie face with its best expression. You must first be able to see 

 your ground properly, and so also to see from it into the distance. If your 

 garden is a wilderness of nature, where you can hardly see a rod before 

 your face, you are not master of your domain; for you cannot, either by 

 sight or imagination, take in its extent or richness, nor own it with your 

 eye, that most imperial of the senses. True art will not show the whole at 

 once, but what it does show will imply the rest, as the hand or foot implies 

 the whole body. The thicket that you let remain will combine with that 

 which you cut away to give the due proportion of seclusion and openness 

 and your pruning-knife or bush-hook well plied will sometimes do wonders 

 in bringing your tangled wilderness into the proportions of a picture. One 

 of our great painters showed me a few days ago a pictun^ on canvas twelve 

 feet by seven, which embodied only a week's work, and was a noble sketch" 

 of a storm in the Rocky Mountains, with all tiie features of snow-capped 

 peaks, majestic cliffs, highland lakes, browsing deer, running brooks, 

 stately trees, and gentle flowers. If he had been two months at work upon 

 the piece the result before the eyes would be enough to show for the labor 

 and time. Yet I have seen more marvellous transformations than that 

 wrought by the knife and axe. Cut away a few bushes and branches 



