10 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
refined perceptions of beauty are combined with them . 55 
And we may add to this, that Landscape Gardening, which 
is an artistical combination of the beautiful in nature and 
art — an union of natural expression and harmonious culti- 
vation— is capable of affording us the highest and most in- 
tellectual enjoyment to be found in any cares or pleasures 
belonging to the soil. 
The development of the Beautiful is the end and aim of 
Landscape Gardening, as it is of all other fine arts. The 
ancients sought to attain this by a studied and elegant 
regularity of design in their gardens ; the moderns, by the 
creation or improvement of grounds which, though of limit- 
ed extent, exhibit a highly graceful or picturesque epitome 
of natural beauty. Landscape Gardening differs from gar- 
dening in its common sense, in embracing the whole scene 
immediately about a country house, which it softens and 
refines, or renders more spirited and striking by the aid of 
art. In it we seek to embody our ideal of a rural home ; 
not through plots of fruit trees, and beds of choice flowers, 
though these have their place, but by collecting and combi- 
ning beautiful forms in trees, surfaces of ground, buildings, 
and walks, in the landscape surrounding us. It is, in short, 
the Beautiful, embodied in a home scene. And we attain it 
by the removal or concealment of every thing uncouth and 
discordant, and by the introduction and preservation of 
forms pleasing in their expression, their outlines, and their 
fitness for the abode of man. In the orchard, we hope to 
gratify the palate, in the flower garden, the eye and the 
smell, but in the landscape garden we appeal to that sense 
of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the high- 
est attributes of our nature. 
This embellishment of nature, which we call Landscape 
