Consult the genius of the place in all.

It is pleasant to enter a rural lane overgrown with field-flowers, or to behold an extensive common irregularly decorated with prickly gorse or fern and thistle, but surely no man of taste would admire nature in this wild and dishevelled state in a little suburban garden.  Symmetry, elegance and beauty, (—­no sublimity or grandeur—­) trimness, snugness, privacy, cleanliness, comfort, and convenience—­the results of a happy conjunction of art and nature—­are all that we can aim at within a limited extent of ground.  In a small parterre we either trace with pleasure the marks of the gardener’s attention or are disgusted with his negligence.  In a mere patch of earth around a domestic dwelling nature ought not to be left entirely to herself.

What is agreeable in one sphere of life is offensive in another.  A dirty smock frock and a soiled face in a ploughman’s child who has been swinging on rustic gates a long summer morning or rolling down the slopes of hills, or grubbing in the soil of his small garden, may remind us, not unpleasantly, of one of Gainsborough’s pictures; but we look for a different sort of nature on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir Thomas Lawrence, or in the brilliant drawing-rooms of the nobility; and yet an Earl’s child looks and moves at least as naturally as a peasant’s.

There is nature every where—­in the palace as well as in the hut, in the cultivated garden as well as in the wild wood.  Civilized life is, after all, as natural as savage life.  All our faculties are natural, and civilized man cultivates his mental powers and studies the arts of life by as true an instinct as that which leads the savage to make the most of his mud hut, and to improve himself or his child as a hunter, a fisherman, or a warrior.  The mind of man is the noblest work of its Maker (—­in this world—­) and the movements of man’s mind may be quite as natural, and quite as poetical too, as the life that rises from the ground.  It is as natural for the mind, as it is for a tree or flower to advance towards perfection.  Nature suggests art, and art again imitates and approximates to nature, and this principle of action and reaction brings man by degrees towards that point of comparative excellence for which God seems to have intended him.  The mind of a Milton or a Shakespeare is surely not in a more unnatural condition than that of an ignorant rustic.  We ought not then to decry refinement nor deem all connection of art with nature an offensive incongruity.  A noble mansion in a spacious and well kept park is an object which even an observer who has no share himself in the property may look upon with pleasure.  It makes him proud of his race.[116] We cannot witness so harmonious a conjunction of art and nature without feeling that man is something better than a mere beast of the field or forest.  We see him turn both art and nature to his service,