ted near a slight elevation, upon a small farm of gently undulating surface. Immediately around, perhaps a space of the area of an acre, is a yard devoted to domestic purposes. This is serviceable for no agricultural object, and may be decorated at a very slight expense, with the richest gems of the forest. Shrubs, either exotic or indigenous, may be set around the dwelling, or if desirable, form the entire hedge of the yard. Trees of widely different character may be grouped upon this surface with very little art, to afford a most pleasing effect. The foliage will serve as a most delightful awning through the summer months, and such of it as is evergreen, may be so disposed, as to ward off the fiercest blasts of winter. Such groups can rarely affect injuriously the adjoining land, or detract from the richness of the soil; since they would be fully nourished by the fertilizing materials always abundant in a farm-yard. They can be set far enough from the roof, to secure it from harmful damp. The kind of tree for this home group, the style of building, the soil, the climate, the situation will direct. Only let there be variety, and thrift, and irregularity, and there will be beauty. The wild vines are not to be forgotten, but should mantle here and there a tree, and stretch their tendrils over window and lintel, climbing high upon the roof. The grape may shade the porch, and bind with its clasps the unhewn column; the sweet briar bloom around, and the lilac bush serve for the habitation of robin and sparrow.

The next available point of decoration will be along the approach road, if the cottage be at any distance from the highway. If this traverse mowing or cultivated land, a low hedge skirting its margin irregularly, will be all that economy will allow; but if pasture land, the hedge may be dispensed with, and the trees be multiplied into an irreg

ular picturesque avenue, broken here and there by the intervention of shrubs, and again left wholly open. The whole border of the farm may be more or less wooded; care being taken to throw the morning shade upon the less available soil. In the instance we have supposed of an undulating surface, the pasture, which will be best disposed upon the more elevated portions, must have its perquisite of shade for cattle. A thousand circumstances will direct the proper arrangement of this. The wood-lot for the supply of fires, is a subject of much concern to landholders; but as in most instances there are vestiges of the original growth, sufficient for the purpose, it will be needless to remark upon it. One thing we will observe-wood is fast becoming more valuable for timber material, than for fuel, and by far the best timber is grown in open situations; the inference is obviously favorable to the views of the tasteful agriculturist. We have spoken of an undulating surface, because most difficult to supply with wooded graces,' in connection with strict economy. The farm of rocks and cliffs on the other hand, may be rendered as beautiful as the wealth of Croesus could make it, by the extremest frugality, if guided by taste. There is much land on every such domain, which nothing but the hand of industry, directed by correct observation, can reach. The shelving bank, the green tuft of the ledge, the rich deposit on the jutting edge of the precipice-these points, which are generally left to the rank grass and stinted shrub, may bloom with beauty, under the hands of an intelligent proprietor. The fir, the pine, the cedar, will find a foothold, and sufficient nourishment upon many a spot unfit for pasturage; and the rich green shrub may tuft every cleft, while the wild violet and anemone spring up beneath them. The steep slopes wher

ever situated, will appear well covered with foliage; and if the selection of growing stock be good, they will yield a greater net profit by this, than by any other culture. A river's bank, if precipitous, will be subject to the same rules. Should the banks extend into a meadow, the rich loam of the soil will doubtless be more available for strictly agricultural products. The rise however from this alluvial delta, if in any degree abrupt, will be the proper spot for planting trees. It is perhaps unnecessary to remark, that it would be better economy still to select such trees as will be valuable for their yearly avails such as the maple, the chestnut, the hickory, and the butternut. And still farther, by making the cottage group an orchard, rendering it picturesque, by mingling the cherry with the plum, the pear with the apple, and by a thousand little devices, which it were less easy to recount, than to teach an attorney the arts of catching clients.

Vines and climbing plants under a proper disposition, become sources of great interest to a country home, while they will in no measure lesson agricultural avails. The grape, the native growth of our forests, may be reared with but little trouble, and by its verdant tendrils and purple clusters, will make beautiful a hundred unsightly objects. We have ourselves seen immense bowlders strown along a meadow, with a very little care, all richly covered with this graceful climber, and yielding abundantly their fruits with every autumn. The little arbor of the cottage, the garden paling, and many of the domestic offices, may have their trailing mantles. We might linger long upon this pleasing subject, with encomium, and our random suggestions; but we close it now, with the old Laird of Dumbiedike's advice to his son Jock, in Scott's Mid-Lothian' romance :— 'Jock, when ye hae naething else

to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping. My father tauld me sae forty years sin', but I naer fand time to mind him."*

"Ground is undoubtedly the most wieldly and ponderous material that comes under the care of the landscape gardener," and as such we should choose to let it alone. Not so Mr. Downing, from whom we take the above well settled opinion. In the building of hills, and excavation of valleys, we have little faith. The character of the approach road, is worthy some attention. We have already alluded to it, and we allude to it now, only to repeat our suggestion-be simple, remembering that simplicity is not always directness. For the matter of gatelodges, we apprehend that designs for them will be somewhat rarely called for, as yet, in our country. And were we rich enough to employ others to perform so trivial an office for us, as the opening and shutting of a gate, we should earnestly wish to hide all show of those services by the intervention of some such machinery, as Mr. Downing has favored us with the model of. A staunch old oak for gate post, and a fir tree for sentinel, are all the monitors we would desire to the grounds of a ducal palace, much less to a republican abode.

To the manor house, the slight depressions of the double furrow,' seem too indicative of a useful cultivation; but to our minds they have a pleasing effect, exhibiting by their trace of former cultivation, the capabilities of the soil for a thousand products useful to man, and showing forth that industry, righteously ordained by Providence,

Sir Walter says in a note to this passage, that this naivé mode of recommending arboriculture, (which was actually delivered in these very words by a Highland laird on his death-bed, to his son,) had so much weight with a Scottish earl, as to lead to his planting a large tract of country.

to furrow the cheek of the laborer, as well as the subject of his toil. Upon the whole, we think the husbandman has little to fear in competition with the wealthiest, on the score of land-beauty. Nature has laid down her seed-fields with considerable taste, and if we may believe Murchison, and Daubeny, and De La Beche, she has had no trifle of experience. She has built up her cliffs, and rounded her sloping meadows, in unison with the highest principles of the sublime and beautiful, as laid down by the London Student at Law; nor has she forgotten Hogarth's line;' and Lorraine did well in copying her more ordinary phases.

Water is a rare addition to a landscape, either in the form of the rill, or the lake. But a treatment of its movements by mortal artificers, we are slow to believe a helper of its beauties. Almost every farm of the interior has its little modicum of this blessed beverage, running its own way; and it is perhaps our ignorance of the genuine effect of the artificial disposal of its treasures, that renders us insensible to its value. Certain it is, that the farmer has a greater opportunity to dispense this feature of nature's beauty to new forms of additional interest, than the lord of the wealthiest manor. For he can unite the charm of utility with many of its finest artificial phases. He can set a thick copse of evergreen and deciduous trees around the mountain spring, to keep its waters free from impurity, and to prevent the too familiar visitings of his herds. As it leaps below, from rock to rock, he can scoop a little basin from the soil, beneath some ancient oak, that his flocks may have a cool place of retreat. Thence he can guide it by most graceful sinuosities to moisten his parched meadow, and far below, taking vantage of some little dell, he can wall in its flow, and set his rustic water-wheel to execute im

portant offices of farm economy. The pond may have its trees, and indentations of shore, and be stocked with its community of fish-all to subserve some useful end-this, with its argosies' of bowing necks, and wings of the domestic fowls, is to our mind a richer repaying outlay, than the finest jet d'eau, spitting its treasured waters from hugest cistern.

We had half a mind to pass by the subject of rural embellishments; still, there is much in the arbor, the rural seat, the grotto, the rustic bridge, to add to a finished landscape. Not so, we think, of the urn, the jet d'eau, the vase, the temple, the rock-work, etc. The vase, if classically elegant, and we admire none other but for sepulchral purposes, is very unfittingly bestowed upon a lawn; and if it be second rate as a work of art, as we think it must be to bear constant exposure, taste decides against it per se. Perhaps we are over incredulous, yet do we strongly be lieve, that the artist who can successfully counterfeit nature in forming rock-work, or produce any thing like an agreeable impression, must be exceedingly 'prodique de génie.'

Every proper embellishment of a landscape, appears to us to have its type in the natural scene. Thus the rustic arbor is suggested by the clustering vines upon a bending tree; the bridge is mirrored in the wildest scene, by the fallen trunk; the seat is but making a convenience of the log or the stump. But we see nothing that could suggest the urn or the statue. The man of humble means, wants no richer embellishments than nature, and a well directed ingenuity, present to his hands. And with the wealthy proprietor, the great danger is in doing too much. Nature will not be forced into a smile-at best, only a grimace. She is not to be flirted with, but only quietly humored-as a sensible woman, which she is. Trees equidistantly planted, gravel

walks describing hyperbolas and ellipses, cascades, and fountains, and sheets of water, and terrace, and campanile, will never of themselves constitute a charm for the man of refined taste.

Nature most assured

ly will frown, if her beauties are set aside to make way for the man's.

For ourselves and Burke and Alison and Wilkie sustain our conclusion, (better authorities than even Repton or Loudon,)—we love a few old giant oaks upon a hillside, where infant feet have trod smooth the grass, sparing the daisy-top, better than the richest group of exotics with shaven turf. So too, we love no lawn where cattle may not browse, and no pool where they may not bathe their fevered limbs; and we appeal to Claude for the justice of our decision-Claude, whose delight it was to paint the eddies dimpling around the "lowing kine." Does Creswick take his landscape views from the park of Belvoir Castle; or rather some out-of-the-way scene of "Brignal banks and Greta woods?" Does "the animal painter to the Queen" take his subjects from the London dairies-sleek, well fed Durhams; or from out some rough crumple-horned Alderneys? Yet the roughnesses, Mr. Davis softens in his portrait; and Mr. Creswick does not offend by painting all the slimy rushes, or the mud-covered stones, or the congregating turtles, or the big-mouthed frogs, that grow or disport on the banks of Greta river. That landscape gardening componere parva magnis-is only tasteful, which teaches gently to soften nature's beauties,-not to remodel, to curry and to comb. Is it not then strange that the farmer, possessing every essential to a perfect landscape, should live on happy in his distaste,

-"like the kine That wander 'mid the flowers which gem our meads, Unconscious of their beauty?"

We have no more time to spend upon the subject. We have endea vored to lay hold of one or two controlling maxims of the art of making the country beautiful, and so to illustrate them that they should be plain to all. We have wished to call more attention to the subject, believing that that attention will pay for itself. Once let there be formed a correct taste, by the landholding population, and the landscapethe whole landscape, will not only smile, but the artisan will insensibly mold his views by the chastity of elegance around him. Ugliness will become, as it ought to be, the type of sloth and niggardness. The growing minds of our country, will be developed under the auspices of new and purer desires. Neatness, and order, and harmony, will be to them almost intuitive perceptions. "The unabating gladness in the serenities of nature," will be " more than sweet" to their growing years. To the man himself, who has redeemed nature from her weeds, and wooed her to his tastes, new aspirations will succeed the pleasures which attend the contemplation of created beauty. Each season will have its dower of flowers to fling at his feet. As the spring heaves up from the frozen ground her buds and blossoming, and his fields teem with their infant harvests, and his tree-tops put on their leafy wonders, and his flocks "multiply" on the green hills,-if he wear a heart that "leaps" when he beholds these tokens of a "love that can not die," surely he will think of Him who "turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the water-springs into dry ground." And when winter has made the ground white, his whistling fir-tree will be, as it were, a God's voice to him, telling him that He has not all forgotten the green earth, but will bring, in their season, "seed-time and harvest."

THE errors of great men make a sad chapter in human history. Luther could not divest himself of a superstitious belief of the Divine presence in the elements of the eucharist; and adopting in the place of transubstantiation, the whim of consubstantiation, the consequence was, a division of the Protestant churches and an end to the Reformation. The whims and crudities of John Wesley, threaten even a longer life of evil working, although perhaps a less amount of evil will actually be worked out. He was a great man, excelling in piety, excelling more in practical wisdom; of good powers of discrimination and logic, but not profound, not learned in theology, not cautious in forming and expressing his opinions. What seemed to him to be on the surface of the Scriptures, or consonant with reason, or fitted to enlarge and purify the church, made up his creed. This creed is the creed of his followers, stereotyped for the faith of all living Wesleyans, and of all that shall live.

How gratifying is the contrast between this chaining of free thought by fixed formularies of faith, and the truly Christian liberty that has ever been enjoyed in the primitive churches of New England! What profound investigations, what thorough discussions, what manly professions of dissent, what honest inquiries even, can be expected in a church that binds her members to the belief of a creed, formed by fallible men, not for themselves only,

*The Scripture Doctrine of Christian

Perfection Stated and Defended; with a Critical and Historical Examination of the Controversy, both Ancient and Modern: also, Practical Illustrations and Advices: in a Series of Lectures. By Rev. George Peck, D. D. New York, G. Lane & P. P. Sandford, 1842.

but for wiser generations after them; and hurls her ecclesiastical censures against all dissentients! The great minds that fall into such chains, are doomed to spend their energies in efforts to reconcile with Scripture and reason these mistakes of the founders of their sect. It is not so among the Congregationalists of New England, nor among the Presbyterians, who are affiliated with them. They have their great men, the fathers of their churches, and the scientific expounders of their faith. They have too, a well defined and well known system of doctrinal articles, which they highly esteem. But they receive the Bible as the infallible and only rule of faith; so that whoever among them proves from the word of God, that a commonly received article of faith is erroneous, or that the reasoning of any standard writer is inconclusive, is esteemed a public benefactor. Witness the reverence and gratitude of the churches toward such men as the elder and the younger Edwards, Dwight, Bellamy, Emmons, and others that are thought to have contributed to the correction of old theological errors. Yet even these men are not held infallible. Their opinions are fair matter of criticism. Tappan and Cheever are in no danger of ecclesiastical censures, for presuming to differ from the elder Edwards, on points of philosophy that affect the foundations of religion. Nor is this owing to indifference to the truth, but to warm attachment. Nothing is feared, but much is expected, from discussion. The conviction seems to be wrought into the very texture of the public mind, that " error may be safely tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." The prospects of truth are bright where such views prevail. Error stands no chance of being im