Landor's Cottage
A PENDANT TO 'THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM'
During a pedestrian tour last summer, through one or two of
the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day
declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing.
The land undulated very remarkably; and my path, for the last
hour, had wound about and about so confusedly, in its effort to
keep in the valleys, that I no longer knew in what direction lay
the sweet village of B-----, where I had determined to stop for
the night. The sun had scarcely shone--strictly speaking--during
the day, which, nevertheless, had been unpleasantly warm. A
smoky mist, resembling that of the Indian summer, enveloped all
things, and, of course, added to my uncertainty. Not that I
cared much about the matter. If I did not hit upon the village
before sunset, or even before dark, it was more than possible
that a little Dutch farmhouse, or something of that kind, would
soon make its appearance--although, in fact, the neighbourhood
(perhaps on account of being more picturesque than fertile) was
very sparsely inhabited. At all events, with my knapsack for a
pillow, and my hound as a sentry, a bivouac in the open air was
just the thing which would have amused me. I sauntered on,
therefore, quite at ease--Ponto taking charge of my gun--until at
length, just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous
little glades that led hither and thither were intended to be
paths at all, I was conducted by one of the most promising of
them into an unquestionable carriage-track. There could be no
mistaking it. The traces of light wheels were evident; and
although the tall shrubberies and overgrown undergrowth met
overhead, there was no obstruction whatever below, even to the
passage of a Virginian mountain wagon--the most aspiring vehicle,
I take it, of its kind. The road, however, except in being open
through the wood--if wood be not too weighty a name for such an
assemblage of light trees--and except in the particulars of
evident wheel-tracks--bore no resemblance to any road I had
before seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly
perceptible, having been impressed upon the firm, yet pleasantly
moist surface of--what looked more like green Genoese velvet than
anything else. It was grass, clearly--but grass such as we
seldom see out of England--so short, so thick, so even, and so
vivid in colour. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route-not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed
the way had been carefully placed--not thrown--along the sides of
the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of
half-precise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque definition.
Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere, luxuriantly, in the
interspaces.
What to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was
art undoubtedly--that did not surprise me--all roads, in the
ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say that there was
much to wonder at in the mere excess of art manifested; all that
seemed to have been done, might have been done here--with such
natural 'capabilities' (as they have it in the books on Landscape
Gardening)--with very little labour and expense. No; it was not
the amount but the character of the art which caused me to take a
seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this
fairy-like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered
admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I
gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form,
had superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had
been taken to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful
on the one hand, and the pittoresco, in the true sense of the
Italian term, on the other. There were few straight, and no long
uninterrupted lines. The same effect of curvature or of colour,
appeared twice, usually, but not oftener, at any one point of
view. Everywhere was variety in uniformity. It was a piece of
'composition', in which the most fastidiously critical taste
could scarcely have suggested an emendation.
I had turned to the right as I entered the road, and now,
arising, I continued in the same direction. The path was so
serpentine, that at no moment could I trace its course for more
than two or three paces in advance. Its character did not
undergo any material change.
Presently the murmur of water fell gently upon my ear--and
in a few moments afterwards, as I turned with the road somewhat
more abruptly than hitherto, I became aware that a building of
some kind lay at the foot of a gentle declivity just before me.
I could see nothing distinctly on account of the mist which
occupied all the little valley below. A gentle breeze, however,
now arose, as the sun was about descending; and while I remained
standing on the brow of the slope, the fog gradually became
dissipated into wreaths, and so floated over the scene.
As it came fully into view--thus gradually as I describe it-piece by piece, here a tree, there a glimpse of water, and here
again the summit of a chimney, I could scarcely help fancying
that the whole was one of the ingenious illusions sometimes
exhibited under the name of 'vanishing pictures'.
By the time, however, that the fog had thoroughly
disappeared, the sun had made its way down behind the gentle
hills, and thence, as if with a slight chassez to the south, had
come again fully into sight; glaring with a purplish lustre
through a chasm that entered the valley from the west. Suddenly,
therefore--and as if by the hand of magic--this whole valley and
everything in it became brilliantly visible.
The first coup d'oeil, as the sun slid into the position
described, impressed me very much as I have been impressed when a
boy, by the concluding scene of some well-arranged theatrical
spectacle or melodrama. Not even the monstrosity of colour was
wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all
orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the
valley was reflected more or less upon all objects, from the
curtain of vapour that still hung overhead, as if loth to take
its total departure from a scene so enchantingly beautiful.
The little vale into which I thus peered down from under the
fog-canopy, could not have been more than four hundred yards
long; while in breadth it varied from fifty to one hundred and
fifty, or perhaps two hundred. It was most narrow at its
northern extremity, opening out as it tended southwardly, but
with no very precise regularity. The widest portion was within
eighty yards of the southern extreme. The slopes which
encompassed the vale could not fairly be called hills, unless at
their northern face. Here a precipitous ledge of granite arose
to a height of some ninety feet; and, as I have mentioned, the
valley at this point was not more than fifty feet wide; but as
the visitor proceeded southwardly from this cliff, he found on
his right hand and on his left, declivities at once less high,
less precipitous, and less rocky. All, in a word, sloped and
softened to the south; and yet the whole vale was engirdled by
eminences, more or less high, except at two points. One of these
I have already spoken of. It lay considerably to the north of
west, and was where the setting sun made its way, as I have
before described, into the amphitheatre, through a cleanly-cut
natural cleft in the granite embankment; this fissure might have
been ten yards wide at its widest point, so far as the eye could
trace it. It seemed to lead up, up like a natural causeway, into
the recesses of unexplored mountains and forests. The other
opening was directly at the southern end of the vale. Here,
generally, the slopes were nothing more than gentle inclinations,
extending from east to west about one hundred and fifty yards.
In the middle of this extent was a depression, level with the
ordinary floor of the valley. As regards vegetation, as well as
in respect to everything else, the scene softened and sloped to
the south. To the north--on the craggy precipice--a few paces
from the verge--upsprang the magnificent trunks of numerous
hickories, black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with
occasional oak; and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the
walnuts especially, spread far over the edge of the cliff.
Proceeding southwardly, the explorer saw, at first, the same
class of trees, but less and less lofty and Salvatorish in
character; then he saw the gentler elm, succeeded by the
sassafras ...
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