August 14, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



387 



M' 



Florence Nightingale's Home. 



ISS Nightingale was l)orn in Florence and named after 

 • that beautiful city, but her early years were passed in 

 England, where her father owned two estates, Embley Park, 

 in Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, in Derbyshire. Lea Hurst was 

 the favorite residence of the family during the summer months, 

 and it is this house which our picture on page 391 represents. 

 It is a stone house, not very large, which stands among woods 

 in a place containing about 5,000 acres, and commands 

 wonderful views of the Peak country. It is about two miles 

 from Cromford station, and not far from Madock, in a delight- 

 ful district watered by the river Derwent, and rich in pictur- 

 esque dales and dingles, moss-grown masses of limestone 

 rock, and wide stretches of moorland. In the vicinity of Lea 

 Hurst stands Willesley Hall, formerly the home of Arkwright, 

 with the mill where the spinning-jenny was first used; and 

 likewise Wingfield Manor, where Mary Queen of Scots was 

 imprisoned for nine years. 



The house at Lea Hurst is in the Elizabethan style of archi- 

 tecture, but we can find no evidence that it is a genuine relic 

 of Elizabethan times, and, at all events, the bay-window in the 

 foreground of our picture, with its balustraded roof, 

 is a piece of modern construction. The interest of the 

 building lies, first, in its associations with a very famous and 

 admirable woman, and then in its typical charm as an example 

 of an English country-house of a modest kind, tastefully sur- 

 rounded by luxuriant plantations. The point to which we 

 especially desire to call attention — as illustrating the counsels 

 we give on another page — is the intimate union into which 

 these plantations have brought the house and its site. The 

 clinging robe of vines, clothing yet not wholly concealing the 

 walls, and the masses of shrubbery, highest opposite the high 

 gables of the front, and sloping irregularly downward toward 

 the entrance steps, form a delightfully soft, graceful, and 

 natural-looking transition between the house itself and the 

 landscape which we imagine further away; and the rugged 

 irregular Cedars of Lebanon on either side of the steps give 

 a desirable accent of force and picturesqueness. If we fancy 

 this house deprived of its shrubberies and standing naked on 

 a stretch of lawn, or encircled by fiat, formal, gaudy flower- 

 beds, we realize the advantages of the more rich yet natural 

 arrangement that we see. 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. 



VIII.— The Love of Nature. 



'T'HE Greeks and Romans, we are often told, cared much for 

 -^ art, little for nature ; a genuine appreciation of the charms 

 of the inanimate world is a product of modern civilization, and 

 only within the past two centuries, with the general growth of 

 "romantic" habits of naind, has it reached its full develop- 

 ment. Of coiu'se a comparison of classic with modern litera- 

 ture has been the basis for this belief; and it certainly seems 

 justified if we study both classes of writings from the same 

 point of view and confine ourselves strictly to the one subject 

 under discussion. 



Nevertheless, while it cannot be denied that there is a dis- 

 tinct and important difference between the classic world and 

 ours as regards the love of Nature, its degree has been much 

 exaggerated, and the true reason for it is not generally under- 

 stood. The first approach to a right conception of the matter 

 was made, I think, by Humboldt in the second volume of his 

 " Cosmos," but even yet his views do not seem to have greatly 

 influenced current thought. As he points out, the witness of 

 Greek literature to a want of poetic sentiment in the presence 

 of Nature is negative, not positive ; it consists in the almost 

 total absence of such descriptive passages — analytical, rhap- 

 sodical, sentimental — as occur in profusion in all the verse and 

 prose of our day. But, he explains, this negative evidence 

 does not prove a "deficiency in sensibility" so much as a lack 

 of strong desire to express it in words. The Greek was chiefly 

 interested in active life and in the spontaneous movements of 

 the human soul ; his poetry therefore took a dramatic, lyric or 

 epic form ; in neither of these is there much place for descrip- 

 tive writing, and his love for Nature was commonly expressed 

 in the personification of all its elements, not in panegyrics 

 upon its actual aspect. If Greek writings are studied with these 

 fundamental and illuminative facts in mind, they imquestion- 

 ably prove that a stronger feeling for natural beauty existed 

 than we have been taught to believe. It revealed itself in a 

 way quite unlike our way, yet was vital and widespread. Do 

 what a modern writer will, man is always the central figure in 

 his pictures, as in the pictures of the ancients. But to-day it is 

 contemplative, receptive man, as affected by the emotions 



which Nature excites ; and her aspect is therefore portrayed 

 with infinite detail and extended explanatory comment. In the 

 classic world, on the otiier hand, active man — doing, thinking, 

 originating man — was always tlie central figure ; his feeling 

 for Nature expressed itself by reading into her beauty his own 

 spontaneous emotions ; by vivifying, personifying her ele- 

 ments ; by giving her, so to say, a multitude of hinnan hearts 

 and souls. 



But, it may be objected, this is a mere begging of the ques- 

 tion. If the Greek had really loved Nature as we do, his mood 

 would often have been like ours — subjective, contemplative, 

 receptive; and he would have created a form of literature 

 proper for its expression. Humboldt's position, as he explains 

 it, is indeed open to this charge ; but he might have greatly 

 strengthened it by showing that the Greek's lack of impulse 

 toward descriptive expression was not confined to the emo- 

 tions which Nature excited. It will hardly be disputed that the 

 Greek, above all other men, had a true, passionate, acute and 

 widespread appreciation for art of every kind. Yet how much 

 does his literature contain in the way of an analysis of the 

 emotions that works of art excited in his mind, or even in the 

 way of detailed description ? Almost endless catalogues of 

 buildings, statues and paintings exist from the pen of travel- 

 ers and historians ; but if a phrase of description or criticism 

 occurs, it is so brief and superficial that we might fancy it 

 written bysomebarbarian stranger rather than by a man akin to 

 those who had created such marvels of beauty and skill. How 

 little we know about the perished paintings of Greece — how 

 much we should know had a single essay of the modern kind 

 been written about them — a single tourist's record, a single 

 chapter of criticism ! No Greek writer helps the modern anti- 

 quary in his disputes over the manner in which the temples 

 were adorned with color ; and even of such celebrated works 

 as the Olympian Jove and the Cnidian Venus we know less 

 than a newspaper reporter of to-day would have told us in a 

 passing paragraph. Works which have excited modern men 

 to a hundred volumes of rhapsodical description and hair-split- 

 ting analysis are passed over by the old writers with a word ; 

 they were eager enough to tell what fine things could be seen in 

 this place or in that, but it rarely occurred to them to say just 

 how they looked, never to explain how they affected their own 

 sensibilities. If we take up such a book as Jefieries' " Field 

 and Hedgerow," we mav think that it reveals more love for 

 Nature than the whole literature of Greece, but all this litera- 

 ture contains less evidence of a delicate feeling for the quali- 

 ties of a work of art than the single essay in this same volume 

 on the " Crouching Venus" of the Louvre. And if we do not 

 draw the conclusion that modern Englishmen feel art more 

 keenly than ancient Greeks, we should be careful not to be too 

 hasty in our generalizations with regard to a love for Nature. 



I do not mean by all this to assert that the Greek loved 

 natin-al beauty just iis we love it to-day. Perhaps he felt it as 

 intensely in some of its manifestations, but he seems to have 

 been comparatively blind to others. Or, to speak more 

 exactly, while he loved all that he thought beautiful in Nature, 

 the term was not so wide a one for him as for us. All his 

 works of art unite in proving that beauty to a Greek meant 

 simplicity, sobriety, clarity, grace, balance and repose. The 

 stern majesty of Egyptian architectm-e was as foreign to his 

 spirit as the elaborate variety of Gothic ; the fantastic rhapso- 

 dies of an Indian epic could no more have sprung from his 

 brain than the awesome, terrible imaginings of a Dante. He 

 had no love in art for the complex, the irregular, the myste- 

 rious, the grotesque, or the gloomy ; and I think almost the 

 same can be said of his love for Nature. In classic thought, 

 moreover, a far greater place than we give to-day was given 

 to the claims of the physical as distinguished from the spirit- 

 ual man, and this fact naturally limited the Greek and Roman 

 in their appreciation of such scenes as are palpably unfit for 

 man's comfortable haliitation. The love we now feel for the 

 awful, the terrible, the savage and grandiose in Nature, was 

 certainly not shared by the men of classic times; but this truth 

 — illustrated by many hackneyed anecdotes — has too often been 

 misread to prove that they did not really care for Nature in 

 any shape. 



Another point which Humboldt makes has regard to the 

 reason for this difference in sensibility. As I have said, it is 

 usually cited to mark an vmlikeness between ancient and 

 modern times, but it is rightly explained, not by facts of time, 

 but by facts of race. That kind of love for art and Nature 

 which the Greek displayed is "classic" in the narrower sense 

 referring to Greece and Rome, not in the wider popular 

 sense which includes all the races and peoples of the ancient 

 world. The Greek differed from the modern German in his 

 love for Nature, not because he was earlier born, but because 



