may be regarded as the solution of a definite problem. Given human flesh and bones, how are they to be so arranged as to produce the maximum of strength and agility? A figure is perfectly graceful when it is so formed that it can walk, or run, or fight, or perform any athletic exercise better than any of its fellows. A movement is graceful when some given end is accomplished with the utmost ease and precision. The excess or defect of power is equally painful to witness; and perfection is reached when the man, regarded as a machine, is so contrived as to apply just the right amount of power in the right place, when a given exertion produces the greatest effect, or a given effect is produced with the greatest ease. The ideal form includes, in short, the perception of perfect adaptation of means to an end. The end being given, we judge instinctively of the completeness of the attainment.

When, however, we speak of scenery it is impossible to suggest any such standard. As soon as we regard Nature as a contrivance for securing our comforts, we pass from the æsthetic to the purely utilitarian point of view. Consider the moon simply as a lighting apparatus, and the stars as intended to fix the longitude and latitude, and they lose all their special charm of the infinite and mysterious. Natural objects are not really adapted to us, but we to them. They are symbols of the great external forces to which we must accommodate ourselves, and which therefore may serve innumerable purposes altogether beyond our power of imagination. The intense perception of this is precisely the very essence of what we call the love of nature. It is the strange and solemn delight which affects a reverent mind when impressed by its own insignificance in this vast and mysterious universe. The architecture of nature belongs to the romantic instead of the classical school. Instead of rounded symmetry and completeness, its glory is in the suggestion of innumerable meanings too vast to be adequately grasped, and too shadowy to be distinctly realised.

There is, it is true, a kind of equivocal sentiment which is sometimes confounded with love of nature. The agriculturist and the gardener take a very proper and healthy pleasure in looking at rich fields and gorgeous flower-beds. They measure the beauty of a landscape by the degree in which it has been thoroughly tamed and adapted to human wants. But between this view and that of the artist there is not so much a contrast as a complete divergence. One may love both a statue and a mountain; but the two sentiments appeal to different parts of our character. Now we ought properly to consider a field or a garden simply as a work of art. The raw material is less altered than in some other products; a garden differs less from a waste than a watch from the bare lumps of metal from which it is formed; but in each case the excellence is proportioned to the completeness with which a definite end has been accomplished. It is a mistake to attempt to blend the two sentiments. Gardens which try to look like nature are generally very bad nature and very bad art. Sham waterfalls are as silly as sham rivers, and even

more absurd; the artificial rocks which it was proposed to place upon the Thirlmere embankments would be the very acme of bad taste; no man can put himself in competition with the Supreme Architect of nature without appearing to be almost profane. What is artificial should be frankly artificial. For my part, I like a garden inclosed by rectangular walls, with straight gravel walks on a geometrical plan, with trees -not exactly clipped into the conventional peacock-but arranged so as to form distinctly artificial masses. Indeed, the most beautiful of gardens are generally good old kitchen-gardens, which not only admit that they are disposed for an end, but admit that it is a utilitarian end. There is no nonsense about them; and beauty comes without being sought. Fine old apple-trees, lichen-covered, and with boughs bent by the weight of fruit, a thick undergrowth of stubborn currant and gooseberry-bushes, the ground carpeted with strawberry-beds, walls covered with carefully-trained fruit-trees, showing luscious peaches and nectarines enough to satisfy the appetite of Dr. Johnson, and suggestive of standing to gnaw their sunny sides with your hands in your pockets-that is the kind of garden which is to me really beautiful. Every bit of ground has been turned to account; in every direction there is a long vista of objects delightful alike to sight, taste, and smell; the lazy humming of bees provokes to drowsy and luxuriant repose; there may be just room for an old well, with a lazy frog or two simmering in the water, a mossy dial, and a green worm-eaten seat, where you need only just stretch out your hand to enjoy the finest, because most infantile, pleasures of the palate. No lawns or pastures or elaborate intricacy of paths can rival such a garden in beauty; and if anybody should deny that it is a poetical taste, he may read Marvell's poem, and learn to appreciate the true gardener's sentiment.

But by the love of nature we generally mean the entirely different sentiment which is provoked in the highest degree by such supreme excellence as the view of the Alps from the Lombard plain, by the Falls of Niagara, or a coast beaten by the full force of the Atlantic. And in this, the very first element, the groundwork of the whole emotion is the suggestion, in one way or another, of the infinite. The object, whatever it may be, need not be of stupendous size; but, for some reason or other, it should carry us beyond ourselves, and make us think of spaces which the wearied imagination cannot follow without flagging, and of the forces which make us feel mere insignificant insects, crawling upon the rind of the monstrous earth.

It is for the want of this element that most English scenery is (I must confess) wearisome to me. An American who lands here for the first time generally admires the country because it reminds him of a garden. That is just why I dislike it. It is so pretty, small, and hidebound so thoroughly subdued by the labours of many generations, that one can scarcely conceive the very existence of cosmical forces. Man seems to have created the world. It is a mere passive instrument in his

hands, as well arranged as a scientific museum. Look at one of those characteristic English landscapes which throw some people into ecstasies. The little hummocks that do duty for hills limit your horizon to some half mile in radius. As if to demonstrate the futility of the struggles of nature, they are cut up by hedges into little parallelograms, which scorn even to adapt themselves to the natural form of the ground. The British country-house in its ancestral domain is surely the very symbol of dull propriety. It is redolent of utter respectability, of dressing for dinner, and talking of the game-laws, and appearing in the family-pew, and slaughtering partridges for want of rational amusement. A park is to a really noble landscape what the half-tame deer or pheasant is to the Alpine chamois or the condors of the Andes. If ever I hang myself, it will be to one of the ancestral trees, from the benevolent purpose of giving a little vague interest to relieve the dulness of the scenery. That there is a wealth of picturesque bits in such country, I willingly admit. They are admirably adapted for pretty little pictures, in which conventional rustics are making eyes at each other across a stile. But the picturesque is to me the deadliest enemy of the beautiful. It means a preference of oddity and eccentricity for its own sake; a taste for queer freaks of architecture and scenery, simply because useless; not as transcending mere utilitarian purposes, but as falling short of them; and therefore an enjoyment of decay, or the merely pretty, which is incompatible with any serious or exalted sentiment. A masculine taste despises it as decidedly as a utilitarian ignores it. A love of the rococo may be pardonable in a drawing-room, but becomes offensive in the open air.

But, as these sentiments are little likely to be popular, I will add that there are parts of English scenery which I admit to be really beautiful. English mists give soft and melancholy effects, and cover up mean details with broad shadows and tender lights, which are grievously missed in the staring sunshine of less favoured lands. And there are districts which are impressive in almost any light. I love, for example-though I fear that my taste is still eccentric-the scenery of the fens, and for a reason forcibly suggested by Mr. Tennyson. There

From the frequent bridge,

Like emblems of infinity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

The long straight lines of the "lodes," or great main drains, give at once the effect of boundless space. There are few more striking views of a kind than are to be seen on some of the reaches of the lazy Cam, where the eye wanders indolently along the straight lines of pollard willows to the dim margin, and descries far away the gray walls of Ely Cathedral, rising in hoary grandeur against the dim sky. Doubtless, the country was more impressive in old days, when the long flights of wild fowl were still to be seen cutting the air above the plashy swamps, and served to carry

the imagination away to their remote haunts in unvisited wildernesses. But even at this day the far-reaching monotony of plain and sky has a singular plaintive music of its own. Perhaps the influence is most perceptible on a winter's evening, when the rivers and dykes are frostbound, when you are borne rapidly homewards across the ice before a steadily blowing north-easter, when all the western sky is a vast flush of roseate haze, casting faint reflections upon the pure white snow, and between you and the sunset is an oscillating string of fenmen rushing forwards at full speed, and flinging back to you the long ringing murmur of their skates. You seem to be jumping forwards into a dim visionary world of twilight, full of tender colours and melancholy sounds, and stretching away beyond all boundary of space. Or, again, no scenery can be more impressive than that of our wilder coasts. There is often a strange beauty even in the district where the tide leaves bare the vast sweeps of gleaming sand. But, of course, the noblest views are given by the granite cliffs that front the Atlantic. Stand, for example, in imagination upon that singular tower of rock which projects at the angle of the great bastion of Hartland Point. Let it be one of the lazy common-place days which are to be had in abundance at any time of year. You are at a height of some hundreds of feet above the sharp ledges, foam-fringed even in quiet weather. Three-fourths of the whole circle of the horizon is occupied by sea. From your advanced outpost you look east and south along vast ranges of cliff, where headland succeeds headland in interminable series, sinking into vagueness in the extreme distance. A few sea-birds are hovering and screaming in mid air, and perhaps a passing raven just croaks out an appropriate sentiment as he floats past. Far away, the sail of a solitary fishing-boat suggests the dangers of the inhospitable coast. And, then, looking out seawards, you see vast shining levels gradually melting into broad shadows, and the shadows succeeded by more distant breadths of light, until at last the eye is carried to the remote band of haze, of which you cannot say whether it is sky or ocean. Inevitably you fall into the mood of the old discoverers, who, when the world was not yet mapped and measured, must have had strange dreams on such promontories of mysterious lands placed far away beyond the sunset. The "Land's End" is one of the few popular names that has some touch of the poetic. It marks the spot, not by the name of some petty tribe or by some common-place feature of the immediate landscape, but by reference to the vastest of terrestrial phenomena. It has an imperial or cosmopolitan sound, and recalls epochs in the world's history and landmarks in the conformation of the planet. If we no longer dream of Eldorado or the land of Prester John, the perpetual booming of the surf may suggest more widely ranging thought. As we see the huge wave, which has come to the assault some thousands of miles, gather itself together, gleam out as if lighted from within with the brilliant blue of the pure ocean, and then bound up the rocky escarpment to fall back upon its successor, we are conscious witnesses

of the eternal strife lasting from the dim geological ages which shaped continents and determines the course of our petty history.

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One other English district has peculiar charms for me, and illustrates the way in which sublimity of effect can be obtained by very humble means. White, of Selborne, if I remember rightly, speaks of the stupendous mountain range" of the South Downs. The Downs, however, scarcely make their appearance even in those ingenious diagrams which geographers place in the frontispiece of an atlas to contrast the relative heights of Mount Everest and Skiddaw or St. Paul's. And yet there are few regions-scarcely even amongst those Alpine ramparts, which overlook hundreds of leagues of plain and hill—which give a more distinct impression of sublimity. It is owing, in part, to the inimitable delicacy of the long sweeping curves of the chalk formation. Loftier mountains have generally a serrated outline, and the chaotic ups and downs of commonplace English scenery are too uncertain to suggest any continuous design. But the huge backs of the chalk downs are defined by parabolic curves, as delicately drawn as the rounded muscles in a shapely limb. The successive ranges blend harmoniously with each other, with just enough contrast to bring out the continuity, so that the sight conveys a kind of physical pleasure in dwelling upon them, as the touch is gratified when one's hand passes over a gently modulated surface. There is no abruptness, no sudden break to arrest the eye, till one 1 comes to the chalk cliff, where the momentary discord is resolved by the harmonious background of sea blue. Then, again, the broad open fields do not break the country up into the likeness of a chess-board; and the villages nestling in the little hollows, with their square church towers and woods shorn level by the sea breeze, do not interrupt the swinging curves of the hills, but, by their habit (as a botanist would say), strengthen the general sense as of a land welcoming with its whole heart the first incursion of the fresh ocean breezes. The faint gray-green of the springing turf, relieved at times by dashes of golden gorse, give a colour in harmony with the delicacy of form. No forms could be better devised to give the sense of vast continuous space. Even a pretty undulation may thus suggest infinity more forcibly than a mountain; just as a few gentle strokes at regular intervals set a chord vibrating, when much heavier blows, struck at random, produce only a momentary shock. The magnificent skies of the region, the broad masses of cloud that sweep in from the sea or pile themselves in vast masses upon the horizon, give actual movement and life to the scenery. The downs, one must suppose, are themselves motionless; but, under the blaze of the broad lights and shadows, they blend, separate, advance and retreat, rise and fall as restlessly as the sea waves, with which they have so close a sympathy. The downs, indeed, have a kind of terrestrial ocean on earth; the land informed by the ocean spirit, seems to give a more forcible utterance to its voices. The stupendous monotony of the sea makes it undeniably dull, because the pretty fraction visible at any moment suggests little