ies and flower-beds at Sloperton Cottage, and the green hills
and vales of Wiltshire.

Sir William Temple observes that "besides the temper of our climate
there are two things particular to us, that contribute much to the
beauty and elegance of our gardens--which are, _the gravel of our walks
and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf_."

"The face of England is so beautiful," says Horace Walpole, "that I do
not believe that Tempe or Arcadia was half so rural; for both lying in
hot climates must have wanted _the moss of our gardens_." Meyer, a
German, a scientific practical gardener, who was also a writer on
gardening, and had studied his art in the Royal Gardens at Paris, and
afterwards visited England, was a great admirer of English Gardens, but
despaired of introducing our style of gardening into Germany, _chiefly
on account of its inferior turf for lawns_. "Lawns and gravel walks,"
says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "are the pride of English
Gardens," "The smoothness and verdure of our lawns," continues the same
writer, "is the first thing in our gardens that catches the eye of a
foreigner; the next is the fineness and firmness of our gravel walks."
Mr. Charles Mackintosh makes the same observation. "In no other country
in the world," he says, "do such things exist." Mrs. Stowe, whose _Uncle
Tom_ has done such service to the cause of liberty in America, on her
visit to England seems to have been quite as much enchanted with our
scenery, as was her countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick. I am pleased to find
Mrs. Stowe recognize the superiority of English landscape-gardening and
of our English verdure. She speaks of, "the princely art of
landscape-gardening, for which England is so famous," and of "_vistas of
verdure and wide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green_ as the
velvet moss sometimes seen growing on rocks in new England." "Grass," she
observes, "is an art and a science in England--it is an institution. The
pains that are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling and
otherwise nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the often-falling
tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be
appreciated." This is literally true: any sight more inexpressibly
exquisite than that of an English lawn in fine order is what I am quite
unable to conceive.[003]

I recollect that in one of my visits to England, (in 1827) I attempted
to describe the scenery of India to William H