The taste of the English in the
cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled.
They have studied Nature intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her
beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which, in other
countries, she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts
of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and
spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.
Nothing
can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park scenery. Vast lawns
that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there clumps of gigantic
trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage. The solemn pomp of groves and woodland
glades, with the deer trooping in silent herds across them; the hare, bounding
away to the covert; or the pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook,
taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake—the
sequestered pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping
on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while
some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an
air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.
These are but a few of
the features of park scenery; but what most delights me, is the creative talent
with which the English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life. The
rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands
of an Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely
discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his
mind the future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his
hand, and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to be
perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of
others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender and graceful
foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf; the partial opening
to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water, all these are managed with
a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet assiduity, like the magic touchings with
which a painter finishes up a favorite picture.
The residence of
people of fortune and refinement in the country has diffused a degree of taste
and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very
laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their
embellishment. The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little
flower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbine trained up, against the wall,
and hanging its blossoms about the lattice; the pot of flowers in the window;
the holly, providently planted about the house, to cheat winter of its
dreariness, and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside;
all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources, and
pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as poets sing,
delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English
peasant. |
