THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 



dous height of the encircling mountains. 

 Yes, mere largeness has its aesthetic value. 

 Size counts. 



In the beauty of landscape, size plays 

 a more important role than anywhere else, 

 outside of military tactics. The vast 

 breadth of the ocean, and the height of the 

 mountains give us our sense of the sublime. 

 Here we have a whole range of most 

 poignant human emotions opened and 

 measured to us by the big things in the 

 landscape. Outside these things we hardly 

 know sublimity, and if we use the word in 

 any other connection it is usually with 

 apologies. 



The American landscape is wild. In 

 many places it is truly savage. Here and 

 there it has all the fierce tempestuous wild- 

 ness of the god-like conflict in which the 

 world was made. No one can compare Eng- 

 land with America, for example, without see- 

 ing that the English landscape is cultivated, 

 subdued, humanized, in a sense overcome by 

 the operations of man. The German 

 forests are ordered like gardens, and look 

 no more like the riotous wilds of Canada 

 or Minnesota than a chess-board looks like 

 a battlefield. To be sure, there is some 



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