"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Young American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

for us, now that sculpture, painting, and religious and civil
architecture have become effete, and have passed into second
childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude wherein to choose a
seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the opportunity of
selection, by making it easy to cultivate very distant tracts, and
yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade and
population. And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate
the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage,
that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden
makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high,
grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the
landscape is pleasing, the garden shows it, -- if tame, it excludes
it. A little grove, which any farmer can find, or cause to grow near
his house, will, in a few years, make cataracts and chains of
mountains quite unnecessary to his scenery; and he is so contented
with his alleys, woodlands, orchards, and river, that Niagara, and
the Notch of the White Hills, and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities.
And yet the selection of a fit houselot has the same advantage over
an indifferent one, as the selection to a given employment of a man
who has a genius for that work. In the last case, the culture of
years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his equal: no
more will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a house in
a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have hitherto little to
boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of
its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the
towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class.
The land, -- travel a whole day together, -- looks poverty-stricken,
and the buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an
aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the best stock,
and the best culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half
the year on their estates, and to fill them with every convenience
and ornament. Of course, these make model farms, and model
architecture, and are a constant education to the eye of the
surrounding population. Whatever events in progress shall go to
disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country
life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face
of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the
occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but
hidden graces of the landscape.

I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending to
endear the land to the inhabitant. Any relation to the land, the
habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates
the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely
uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory,
values it less. The vast majority of the people of this country live
by the land, and carry its quality in their manners and opinions. We
in the Atlantic states, by position, have been commercial, and have,
as I said, imbibed easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now
that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky