American landscape

“ The imperfect state of settlements in a country still comparatively new, prevents many persons from forming just views of the splendour of the scenery. In a landscape of any great extent, the proportion of wild forest throws a gloom over the whole, and the eye, accustomed to the haunts of man, demands instinctively a more smiling scene of cultivation and habitation. ”

“ The greater natural freedom that exists in an ordinary American landscape, and the abundance of detached fragments of wood, often render the views of this country strikingly beautiful when they are of sufficient extent to conceal the want of finish in the details, which require time and long-continued labor to accomplish. In this particular we conceive that the older portions of the United States offer to the eye a general outline of view that may well claim to be even of a higher cast, than most of the scenery of the old world. ”

“ The most opposite views, the new and the old, the conventional and the truly imaginative, the severely real and the more latitudinarian, the earnest and the flippant, the pedantic and the broad, far reaching—will continue to clash for a season, while a school of American Landscape is, we think, destined to rise steadily through the chaotic elements, and to reach a height of excellence to which the conscientious efforts of all advocates of the highest Truth in Art will have greatly contributed. ”

“ Upon the mind of an American, especially, accustomed to see new lands clothed with timber, and to associate the idea of damp and silent forests with that of a new country, the appearance of sunny plains, and a diversified landscape, untenanted by man, and unimproved by art, is singular and striking. ”

“ Even the Americans in many cases seem to care little for wild or beautiful scenery: they are more attracted by smiling landscape gardening, and, as it seems to us, flat or dull cultivation. I have heard an American just arrived in Europe go into unfeigned ecstasies over the fields and hedges in the flattest part of the Midlands. ”

“ Part of the American earth—not only in description on a map, but in the reality of our shores, our hills, our parks, our forests, and our mountains—has been permanently set aside for the American public and for their benefit. ”

“ Either Nature has wrought with a bolder hand in America, or the effect of long continued cultivation on scenery, as exemplified in Europe, is greater than is usually supposed. Certain it is that the rivers, the forests, the unshorn mountain-sides and unbridged chasms of that vast country, are of a character peculiar to America alone—a lavish and large-featured sublimity, (if we may so express it,) quite dissimilar to the picturesque of all other countries. ”

“ It is a beautiful vision in the midst of the wildest and most dreary scenery; and its sudden appearance—for nothing of it is seen till the tourist is immediately under it—is a moment of deep delight to him from the suddenness of the contrast. The lover of nature loves to linger among the wild beauties of this region; and some of the finest ideas of the American painters have been gleaned amongst its solitudes. ”

“ The eye of an American is perpetually presented with an outline of wonderful magnificence and grandeur; every work of nature is here on a vast and expansive scale; the mountains, and lakes, and rivers, and forests, appear in a wild sublimity of grandeur, which renders the mountains, lakes, and rivers of Europe, mere pigmies in comparison. ”

“ It requires the prospective glance of an American to see the form of nature, which is now in dishabille, restored to her neat drapery, glowing with vegetation, and decked with flowers. The outline of her fair proportions is enough for him; and so that is beautiful, as in this country it almost every where is, he can finish the portrait to his fancy, and make a flowery Tempe of a prostrate wilderness. ”

“ Where the “new land” corresponds most to its name, rejoices most visibly and complacently in its newness, its dumped and shovelled foundations, the home till recently of a mere vague marine backwater, there the long, straight residential avenues, vistas quite documentary, as one finds one’s self pronouncing them, testify with a perfection all their own to a whole vast side of American life. The winter winds and snows, and the eternal dust, run races in them over the clearest course anywhere provided for that grim competition ”

“ Grand as is the thought that doubtless the child is already born who will see a hundred millions of people, the most prosperous and advanc'd of the world, inhabiting these Prairies, the great Plains, and the valley of the Mississippi, I could not help thinking it would be grander still to see all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless—altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe's soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit. ”

“ The mind will expand itself to the measure of things about it. Deep in the wide American soul there shall be Lake Superiors, inland oceans of thought; and the streams of her eloquence shall be like the sweep of the Mississippi in his strength. The rugged strength of the New England hills, the luxuriance of the sunny South, the measureless expanse of the prairie, the broad flow of our rivers, the dashing of our cataracts, the huge battlements of the everlasting mountains,—these are American. On the face of the globe there is nothing like to them. ”

“ Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty of the country!
The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times, in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the hand of man, how different the human interest is! ”

“ How represent the excessive richness of the foliage! How draw the vanishing lines which mark the swells in the forest-ground, the round heaps of the chestnut-tops, the greener belts through the wilderness which betray the wanderings of the water-courses! How give in so small a space the evasive swiftness of the rapid, the terrific plunge of the precipice, or the airy wheel of the eagle, as his diminished form shoots off from the sharp line of the summit, and cuts a circle on the sky!
The general architecture of the United States cannot pretend, of course, to vie with that of older countries ”

“ The natural scenery of America has often been contrasted, in its general features as well as in detail, with the landscape of the Old World—more especially of Europe—and not deeper has been the enthusiasm, than wide the dissension, of the supporters of each region. ”

“ I have never been so strongly and constantly reminded of America, as during this journey. Perhaps the balmy season, the same in which I last looked upon the dear scenes of home, may have its effect; but there is besides a richness in the forests and waving fields of grain, a wild luxuriance over every landscape, which I have seen nowhere else in Europe. The large farm houses, buried in orchards, scattered over the valleys, add to the effect. Everything seems to speak of happiness and prosperity. ”

“ Now is the time, if it ever was, to develop an American character, to show the world what treasures of life, strength and originality this country contains. Beyond the old conventional belles lettres and æsthetic scholarship which limited us in peace, lies a fair land, a wilderness it may be, but one bearing beautiful, unknown flowers, and strange but golden fruits, which are well worthy a garden. ”

“ In reading the journals and narratives of the early settlers of New England nothing is more remarkable than the entire silence of the worthy writers in respect to the natural beauty or grandeur of the scenery amid which their lot was cast. They designated the grand and glorious forest, broken by lakes and crossed by great rivers, intersected by a thousand streams more beautiful than those which the Old World has given to song and romance, as "a desert and frightful wilderness." ”

“ As traveler after traveler passed over the routes of his predecessor in this period, reporting the life by the wayside and in the towns, we can almost see American society unfolding with startling rapidity under our gaze; farms become hamlets, hamlets grow into prosperous cities; the Indian and the forests recede; new stretches of wilderness come into view in the farther west, and we see the irresistible tide of settlement flowing towards the solitudes. ”

“ her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine;—no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery. ”

“ Of first importance in the making of the American people is that great forest which once extended its mysterious labyrinth from tide-water to the prairies when the earliest colonists entered warily its sea-worn edges a portion of the European race came again under a spell it had forgotten centuries before, the spell of that untamed nature which created primitive man. ”

“ But in America, even though many successive days of unbroken travel may have run into one, or its many variations—from populous states to desert ones, from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, canyoned hills to herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to oak forest, from sodden marsh to arid cactus-land—may have got blurred together, there grows at the end of it all upon the mind a befitting sense of vastness which neither linear measurement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully explain. ”

“ Viewed merely as the latest scene of migration of European races on a great scale, America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive history. There we see the land cleared of its virgin forest, the soil prepared for its first tillage, the site of the future city chosen, and the birth of the world’s historic capitals epitomised in those of the youngest American commonwealths. ”

“ But just beyond the rugged barrier of those western hills lies a grander landscape, of wide extent, through which flows New England’s greatest river, and crossed front end to end by New England’s busiest thoroughfares, dusty with the tread of commerce, and bordered with growing cities and thrifty, busting towns. ”

“ Let the striking contrast, since the forest has been made to blossom as the rose, be viewed in such an impressive light as to operate on the mind of every son and daughter of America and lead to the uniform practice of public an private virtue. ”

“ Indeed, country life is tame, and intolerable, without a taste, either natural or acquired, for fine landscape scenery; and in a land like this, where the country gives occupation to so great a proportion of its people, and a large share of those engaged in the active and exciting pursuits of populous towns, sigh and look forward to its enjoyment, every inducement should be offered to cultivate a taste for those things which make one of its chief attractions. ”

“ The landscape combined all the elements of sublimity and of beauty, with towering mountains and lovely meadows, streams and lakes watering the interior, and harbors inviting the commerce of the world. ”

“ He who stands on a hill and surveys a wide landscape, easily recognizes the leading features of the country—the river and the homestead, the church and the corn-field—they need no guide, they tell their own tale. In like manner the great landmarks of the literature of the past are well defined and unmistakable to him who has eyes to see and a mind to comprehend. ”

“ 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 them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape. ”

“ Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,—these are things on which everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the country at all) the eye rests in peace and delight. ”

“ This is America!” And so it is. The true life of the New World is not to be seen in great cities, with great palaces and dirty alleys, but in the abundance of its small communities, of its beautiful private dwellings, with their encircling fields and groves, in the bosom of grand scenery, by the sides of vigorous rivers, with mountains and forests, and all appliances for a vigorous and affluent life. ”

“ I always did like these here mountains—and the big trees—and the rocks and water and the snow. Everywhere else the country belongs to some one: it's staked out. Up here it belongs to me, because I'm an American. This country belongs to all of us—the people—all of us. ”