Art Out-of-Doors 



Among all our parks Central Park is the 

 most interesting and instructive. One or 

 two others may be counted more beautiful, 

 but this is because their sites were much 

 more advantageous. The difficulties which 

 attended the formation of Central Park give 

 it its peculiar value. No harder task than 

 the creation of a big pleasure-ground in the 

 centre of the Island of Manhattan can ever 

 be suggested to a landscape-gardener ; and, 

 therefore, when its success is appraised, it 

 teaches, like the Chicago Fair-grounds, the 

 important lesson : Never despair. More- 

 over, while the broken, rocky character 

 of its surface offered comparatively little 

 chance for such wide and stately effects 

 as delight us in Prospect Park, in Frank- 

 lin Park, and in the South Park at Chi- 

 cago, it was extremely favorable (given an 

 extremely able artist) to the production of 

 varied beauty in details. So this park 

 shows, in a striking way, how broad beauty 

 may be compassed under seemingly deter- 

 rent conditions, and at the same time of- 

 fers an unusual assortment of those smaller 

 beauties which are all that the landscape- 



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