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FREDERICK LAWV OLMSTED
ject of landscape. Before he was fifteen
he had read the chief books on landscape
gardening that had been written. Yet it
was the beauty of Thomson's "great sim-
ple country," rather than the tutored ele-
gance of the garden, or the rugged pictur-
esqueness of the wilderness that he chiefly
loved. The reposeful, pastoral scenery of
his native state of Connecticut, rich in the
beauties of meadow, orchard, stream, and
lane, he loved not less than the charms of
the great mountain and mighty rivers.
"No gravel paths," he wrote, "are half so
charming as the turfed wood roads of New
England farms, no shrubbery so pleasing
as that which nature rears along farmers'
walls, no pools so lovely as those which,
fringed with natural growth, fill and drain
away according to the season and the sup-
ply of rain."
  'That a man with this delicate artistic
feeling for landscape should have been able
to impress the stamp of his individuality on
the entire public park policy of the United
States seems wonderful, till one compre-
hends that the secret of it was the sentiment
of human brotherhood which prevented him
from professing any taste which the uncul-
tivated might not share. Instead of per-
mitting a gulf to separate him from his
clients, he adopted their own point of view.
Nature, he confessed, had never appealed
to him in quite the same way as to the
botanist or the naturalist, nor did he claim
intimate companionship with nature in the
same sense as Thoreau, Bryant, or Bur-
roughs. In this unsophisticated way, pro-
fessing no closer acquaintance with birds
and trees, no more cultured connoisseurship
of landscape, than the generality of men
living in cities, he invited the untutored
common people, greatly his inferiors in
aesthetic perceptions, to foster a delight in
nature which might be utterly free from
affectation or hypocrisy. This fact ac-
counts for the marvellous impetus and in-
spiration which the American park move-
ment received at his hands. Cities entered
cordially into co6peration with him, and
there were few recommendations that he
made which they did not adopt. This re-
sult was brought about through his own
modesty and sound judgment. A trained
man of affairs, disciplined, as he had been,
by such great undertakings as the super-
vision of the construction of Central Park
and the organization of the work of the
Sanitary Commission, he was able, throug],
his knowledge of his fellows and his fac-
ulty for sane and convincing argument, to
achieve what no avowed champion of a
novel cult, hiding from plebeian ridicule
behind a screen of professional sanctity,
could ever have accomplished.
  As for the art of Frederick Law Olmsted,
one of its methods may be said to have con-
sisted in substituting the simplicity of
utility for the ornateness of artifice. Cleve-
land, an  American   landscape architect,
whose ideals had much in common with
those of Mr. Olmsted, wrote of Mr. "Capa-
bility" Brown, the English gardener, as
falling into one fault in his zeal to avoid
another. For geometrical angles Brown
attempted to substitute graceful curves, so
that it was remarked of his serpentine paths
and canals that "you might walk from one
end to the other, stepping first upon zig,
and then upon zag, for the entire length."
Similar scenic effects, at least with respect
to ingenuity, must have characterized the
extraordinary   fortifications in   Uncle
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