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connexion with pictorial art in the Department of 

 Landscape. What is the picturesque? A question 

 not easily answered; yet this is certain, that any 

 attempt that may be made to find an answer for it 

 must bring us in contact with the very elements which 

 already have been named; and which are assembled 

 in the idea of patriarchal repose. 



"The picturesque is not simply beauty in nature — 

 it is not luxuriance; it is not amplitude and vastness; 

 it is not copiousness; it is not the fruit of man's 

 interference: but rather it is the consequence of an 

 indolent acquiescence on his part in things as they are 

 or as they have become; the picturesque belongs to the 

 foreground always, or to the stage next beyond the 

 foreground — ^never does it take its range beyond 

 the horizon. The picturesque claims as its own 

 the cherished and delicious ideas of deep seclusion, 

 of lengthened, tmdisturbed continuance, and of the 

 absence, afar off, of those industrial energies which 

 mark their presence by renovations, by removals, 

 and by a better order of things, and by signs of busy 

 industry and of thriftiness and order. 



"Within the sacred precincts of the picturesque, 

 the trees must be such as have outlived the winters of 

 centuries, and been green through the scorching heats 

 of unrecorded sultry summers: they stoop and yet 

 hold up giant gnarled branches, leafy at the extreme 

 sprays; and their twistings are such that they look 

 supernatural, seen against an autumnal evening sky. 

 The fences that skirt the homestead, of the pictur- 



