Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of the people,
every thing invites to the arts of agriculture, of gardening, and
domestic architecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plantations
in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the
old countries that strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than
the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence, the
Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens at
Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works easily imitated here, and
which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and inflame
patriotism. It is the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture,
painting, and religious and civil architecture have become effete, and
have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude
wherein to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the
opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very distant
tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade
and population. And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate
the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage, that
it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the
face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or
mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is
pleasing, the garden shows it,--if tame, it excludes it. A little grove,
which any farmer can find, or cause to grow near his house, will, in a
few years, make cataracts and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to
his scenery; and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards
and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills, and Nantasket
Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of a fit houselot has
the same advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection to a given
employment of a man who has a genius for that work. In the last case,
the culture of years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his
equal: no more will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a
house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have hitherto little to
boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of its
population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns,
and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The
land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the
buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic
structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best
culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half the year on their
estates, and to fill them with every convenience and ornament. Of
course, these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a
constant education to the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever
events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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