tellectual clearness, apprehend the materials and the mode of arrange ment, by means of which, and through which he is to express these sentiments. The assumption, therefore, of the possibility and the necessity of this firm apprehension remains to be vindicated.

Of the possibility, generally, of expressing æsthetic sentiments and ideas in the forms of vegetable life, enough has already been said. And to him who has schooled himself in nature, who has been wont to throw himself under the influence of the outer world, and to mark the diverse character of those influences as determined by diverse scenes and objects, little in addition need be said to show the possibility of expressing, in appropriate forms of vegetable life, the specific elements of landscape expression that have been enumerated. It is hardly poetry, or if poetry, it is poetic truth to say, that every vegetable structure and form, from the low creep ing vine to the tall spreading oak, has its own expression; while the unlimited permutation of groups and combinations, both in kind and in place, shows a range and scope of diversified expression as unlimited. It would almost be a reflection on the divine artificer of the universe, to suppose for a moment that the objects of the vegetable world do not, in some sufficient degree, correspond in variety of character with the variety of sentiments, that in his constitution and investiture of nature, he has shown, may, and for man's benefit should be imaged in landscape.

The æsthetic student of nature has without difficulty learned the character of each form of vegetable life, and to him it has become an easy task to translate the peculiar expression of each into its proper æsthetic sentiment. The reverse act, to image forth the sentiment in tree and vine and shrub and flower, if more uncommon, or even more

difficult, is the more pleasing effort of a creative mind.

The expression of resthetic elements by arrangement, requires a higher skill. Here forecast is necessary. Here is needed that high imaginative power, the most essential and most characteristic element of artistic genius-the power to construct proposed forms of beauty from materials, various, multiform, and rude. Out of the countless possible forms which diverse arrangements of given materials may furnish, he is to keep in his mind steadily his own ideal expression, and then pass before his view the successive possible groups and combinations till the desired antitype appear. Yet this is the common labor of every artistTo arrest the fleeting images that fill The mirror of the mind and hold them fast, And force them sit, till he has penciled off Then to dispose his copies with such art That each may find its most propitious light, Than by the labor and the skill it cost. And shine by situation hardly less

A faithful likeness of the forms he views;

It is to be borne in mind, moreover, that degrees in the richness of the expression are admissible, even when the same sentiment is imaged in the landscape. The coloring, so to speak, may be Rubenslike, deep and strong; or in the manner of Guido Reni, little more than bare light and shade. The composition may vary from the extremest simplicity to the most crowded denseness in almost every kind of landscape expression; and the artist may consult his own skill in the degree of richness he will impart to his work.

This department of his labor implies and requires æsthetic culture. He who knows nothing of the ca pability of expressing sentiment residing in the vegetable world, who has never felt the power of scenery grave or gay, on his own heart, or when impressed has never followed out the effect to its producing cause, may well decline the work of adapt

ing grounds to æsthetic expression. But he who would labor intelligently and with confidence must certainly know beforehand, what materials and what arrangement will best express the character of beauty he desires.

The exposition that has been given of the guiding principles of practical landscape, will, it is hoped, suffice to show that this is a true art in the highest sense; that, if we adopt the principle in the broadest import, "To spirit, can only spirit speak; only where an idea shines forth do we recognize true art," landscape is yet not excluded. The very soul of landscape is the expression of a rational sentiment or idea. It is an art that may be cultivated by all. The rudest peasant, as he may feel the power of beautiful and graceful form in landscape, is so far endowed with the power of creating it; while, from the very nature of the art, its power may be exerted in beautifying the scanty gardenplot as well as in embellishing and enriching the most extended park or field.

It is an art, like every other, requiring study and labor. A half hour's effort with rule and measure will not suffice to create expressive landscape. Nor will the want of all care or thought, save only to shun the stiffness of geometrical lines, of course secure the expression of real beauty, such even as is sometimes found in nature unadorned by art. Mere irregularity is not natural beauty. There may be beauty in the individual tree or shrub, while there is no beauty of arrangement or combination-the essential thing in landscape expression. "Elegance," to quote still again the garden-poet of our literature,

"Elegance, chief grace the garden shows And most attractive, is the fair result Of thought-the creature of a polished mind.”

Ficker.

It is an art, moreover, that loves the light. The groping, tentative, it scorns. Its work is in intelligence throughout. From beginning to end the true artist proceeds in distinct apprehension of his object and his way. He errs not, therefore, and his result is sure.

It is an art, still further, self-sufficing and independent. Architecture it indeed embraces as a part of its own province. But the recourse, so often made, to eke out its imagined poverty and leanness, to the products of the chisel and the pencil, wrongs the art; and the wrong is generally resented. In the language of the elegant Herder," where this beautiful art beautifies a land, no statues are needed on the way. In full life there meet us with their gifts, Pomona, Ceres, Pales, Vertumnus, Sylvanus, Flora." Where we have the living original, inanimate copies are out of place. In the manifold forms and products of vegetable life, is supplied to the ingenious artist all the materials which the fullest and richest expression can require. Under the mild sun of Italy, arches and vases and statues may possibly be introduced into the villa, as in harmony with the general landscape effect. But even there the admiring traveler, after passing out of the rich galleries of proper in-door art-of stat uary and painting, feels no disposition to stop and study the sculptured forms which line his path to the true and pure landscape. And when he gives up his spirit to the full power of majestic forest and flower-enameled lawn, or winding stream, and sloping hill-side, various yet harmonious, natural, yet breathing rational sentiment, he gladly overlooks and drops from view the coarse, storm-pelted statuary which a prodigal, not a refined, art has scattered here and there. In ruder climes, the bolder, sterner forms of architecture alone can be admitted; and these only as propri

ety, fitness to end, shall evidently require.

It is an art, moreover, of the highest moral value. All true art, indeed, embodies a moral sentiment or idea. The inner life and spirit in every true æsthetic work, in every true æsthetic object or scene, is this moral idea which inhabits and animates it. But landscape is of all arts the most expressive of moral truth. Even the unthinking child feels its elevating, grace-inspiring influence. The unfolding spirit under the constant power of expressive landscape, will mould itself into the forms of beauty and grace which are ever impressed upon it. Abstract rule, cold precept, arbitrary authority, necessary as they are, will yet yield, in power to form to virtuous sentiment, to the force of winning, subduing landscape, ever teaching, yet never obtruding, never irritating, drawing, not driving to the love and practice of what is pure and graceful and lovely. That "Heaven be near us in our infancy," need not be a poet's dream. It should be a common reality. In the sense of whatever is pure and lovely, it may be planted around every dwelling; may smile around every rustic cottage as on every wide-spread park and lawn.

No

more effective moral teacher can be conceived. Happy for our land if all over its wide extent, fast as its swelling population dot it over with dwelling and shop, with hall and

temple, and mark it off in yard and orchard and cultivated field and pasture, the spirit of taste might breathe, and, as in the nature of the case is possible, shape each architectural and rural labor into bright forms of loveliness and grace that everywhere should woo to virtue. In crowded city and in sequestered country life, in the scant yard of the humble peasant and on the wide domains of wealth and fortune, in the rude hut and the princely palace, everywhere, the art of landscape may work with all its pleasing, elevating power.

Happy, indeed, for our country, if what kind heaven has placed within our power, if what kind heaven has seemed to devolve upon us as our great mission-work and destiny, neglecting and suffering to die the rude arts of violence and war, our hands and hearts were turned to the great art of peacethe tasteful culture and investiture of our wide extended soil, seeking ever not merely to derive from fruitful nature bare satisfaction of animal wants-mere shelter and food for the body, the low aim to which necessity seems to have bound down the people of other lands, but also, with this, to convert nature into a minister to the spirit's wants, spread over its expanded face images of what is true and sacred, and make earth itself thus an ever present picture of heaven.

AN eminent painter once said to us, that he always disliked to at

Memoir of Mrs. Mary E. Van Lennep, only daughter of the Rev. Joel Hawes, D.D., and wife of the Rev. Henry J. Van Lennep, Missionary in Turkey. By her Mother. Hartford: Belknap & Hamersly.

tempt the portrait of a woman; it was so difficult to give to such a picture the requisite boldness of feature and distinctness of individual expression, without imparing its feminine character. If this be true in the delineation of the outer and material form, how much more true

is it of all attempts to portray the female mind and heart! If the words and ways, the style of thinking and the modes of acting, all that goes to make up biography, have a character sufficiently marked to individualize the subject, there is danger that, in the relating, she may seem to have overstepped the decorum of her sex, and so forfeit the interest with which only true delicacy can invest the woman.

It is strange that biography should ever succeed. To reproduce any thing that was transient and is gone, not by repetition as in a strain of music, but by delineating the emotions it caused, is an achievement of high art. An added shade of coloring shows you an enthusiast, and loses you the confidence and sympathy of your cooler listener. A shade subtracted leaves so faint a hue that you have lost your interest in your own faded picture, and of course can not command that of another. Even an exact delineation, while it may convey accurately a part of the idea of a character, is not capable of transmitting the more volatile and subtle shades. You may mix colors never so cunyour ningly, and copy never so minutely every fold of every petal of the rose, and hang it so gracefully on its stem as to present its very port and bearing, but where is its fragrance, its exquisite texture, and the dewy freshness which was its crowning grace?

So in biography, you may make an accurate and ample statement of facts, you may even join together in a brightly colored mosaic the fairest impressions that can be given of the mind of another-his own recorded thoughts and feelings-and yet they may fail to present the individual. They are stiff and glaring, wanting the softening transition of the intermediate parts and of attending circumstances.

And yet biography does some times succeed, not merely in raisVOL. VI.

44

ing a monumental pile of historical statistics, and maintaining for the friends of the departed the outlines of a character bright in their remembrance; but in shaping forth to others a life-like semblance of something good and fair, and distinct enough to live with us thenceforward, and be loved like a friend, though it be but a shadow.

Such has been the feeling with which we have read and re-read the volume before us. We knew but slightly her who is the subject of it, and are indebted to the memoir for anything like a conception of the character; consequently, we can better judge of its probable effect upon other minds. We pronounce it a portrait successfully taken-a piece of uncommonly skillful biography. There is no gaudy exaggerations in it, no stiffness, no incompleteness. We see the individual character we are invited to see, and in contemplating it, we have all along a feeling of personal acquisition. We have found rare treasure; a true woman to be admired, a daughter whose worth surpasses estimation, a friend to be clasped with favor to the heart, a lovely young Christian to be admired and rejoiced over, and a self-sacrificing missionary to be held in reverential remembrance. Unlike most that is written to commemorate the dead, or that unveils the recesses of the human heart, this is a cheerful book. It breathes throughout the air of a spring morning. As we read it we inhale something as pure and fragrant as the wafted odor of

There is no austerity in its piety, no levity in its gladness. It shows that "virtue in herself is lovely," but if "goodness" is ever "awful," it is not here in the company of this young happy Christian heart.

We have heard sometimes that a strictly religious education has a tendency to restrict the intellectual growth of the young, and to mar its grace and freedom. We have been told that it was not well that our sons and daughters should commit to memory texts and catechisms, lest the free play of their fancy should be checked, and they be rendered mechanical and constrained in their demeanor, and dwarfish in their intellectual stature. We see nothing of this exemplified in this memoir. One may look long to find an instance of more lady-like and graceful accomplishment, of more true refinement, of more liberal and varied cultivation, of more thorough mental discipline, of more pliable and available information, of a more winning and wise adaptation to persons and times and places, than the one presented in these pages. And yet this fair flower grew in a cleft of rugged Calvinism; the gales which fanned it were of that "wind of doctrine" called rigid orthodoxy. We know the soil in which it had its root. We know the spirit of the teachings which distilled upon it like the dew. The tones of that pulpit still linger in our ears, familiar as those of that good old bell,* and we are sure that there

"Our new and deep-toned bell rings this day for the first time, calling us to that church we love so well. I shall love this I know, though 'tis not the bell of my childhood. That good old bell! connected as it was with so many of the happiest seasons of my life-whose tones were the familiar ones of my earliest moments; could I help loving it? My father says, I shall not hear that bell in Smyrna. No, its tones will not reach me there. There will come a time, when I shall no more go up to that sanctuary, which has been my Sabbath home from

is no pulpit in all New England more uncompromising in its demands, more strictly and severely searching in its doctrines.

But let us look more closely at the events of this history of a life, and note their effect in passing, upon the character of its subject.

Mary, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Hawes, of Hartford, Conn., was born in 1821. The death of a sister a little older, and of two brothers younger than herself, left her the only daughter, and for some time the only child of the family. Her father says of her :

"It is a very pleasant remembrance to her parents, that from her earliest years she was a peculiarly affectionate and dutiful child. Her tender mind opened itself in docility and love; and the fragrance of its affections upon all like a fresh flower of spring, shed forth around. To know the desires of her father, or mother, was enough to engage a prompt and cheerful obedience. She was early taught that she was a sinner, and needed the renewing grace of God to fit her for his service and kingdom; and from the time she was eight years of age, she was the subject of more than usually deep religious impressions. She felt that her heart was not right with God; that she needed what every human being, however young, and however amiable, needs, a new heart to be

given her by the Holy Spirit.

"On entering her tenth year, there was a marked change in her feelings. The scene was one never to be forgotten, either by herself or her parents. It was noticed, that, for some days, her mind was the subject of intense and serious thought. Occasionally the unbidden tear would be seen trembling in the eye, or

my earliest years; when I shall no more join in its holy services. But I am not cast down; through my tears, I can look to a more glorious temple above, where God and the Lamb forever dwell. No, no; this dear place of worship, that has nurtured many plants of piety, will be called mine no more, when I depart from the home of my youth; but if I humbly walk in the ways of piety, and lean upon Jesus for strength, may I not hope that he will go with me in all my wanderings, make me bold and faithful in his service, and that he will cause the truths which I have here heard, to spring up in my heart, and bear fruit forever."-p. 147.