T seems to have escaped the critical eye of many observers who seem to be ready to accept a very small and undetermining part for a very large whole that the great ellipse that runs from one focus, Portland, Maine, to the second focus, Washington, D. C., with its longer axis along the Piedmont divide, parallel to the coast, contains within its varied surface at the present day the most supreme appeal in the way of beauty of rural landscape that this hurrying globe knows. Even in this automobile age, when the many (as well as the expert few who have a deep knowledge of the significance, the dignity, and the nobility and the rare charm which this region reveals and exhales) are more or less aware of its superficial scenic features, the real glory of the American countryside is not realized as profoundly as it should be, though beautifully revealed by the rustic and placid externals, the garden reaches, the cultivated and fallow fields, the woodland vistas, the river valleys, and the lakes, and the mountains of this tremendously important population ellipse! It is a region that can challenge any other section of the temperate zone, about which rural loveliness has been predicated by poet and painter, and win most easily. In extent it has a little more than the actual area in square miles of England. It ranges from the sea-washed rock ledges of Maine to the southern part of New Hampshire and Vermont, reaches Albany and the upper Hudson and the Catskills, all southeastern New York and the northeastern extensions of the Alleghenies, as it swings down in Pennsylvania through the Wyoming Valley and the Susquehanna and the Juniata to the southern focus, taking in on its southeastern side all of Massachusetts, Rhode

Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and most of Delaware and eastern Maryland, and, of course, the most important region of all from the point of view of the sheer ravishment of a countryside that is almost theatrical in its beauty, all southeastern Pennsylvania!

In this enchanted ellipse the characteristic aspects range from the most concentrated urban appeal-since, despite its fastnesses, in population it is overwhelmingly urban with nearly thirty million people, representing, in their highest aspects, a civilization of such refinement and elegances as puts the whole world in tribute to satisfy the needs and supply the luxuries that flow to it as if drawn by some overwhelming magnet-to the suburban, while the tributary rural districts, varying in topography and in climate, reflect a "New World" beauty which is the result of natural conditions and of a settlement cultivation running back for three hundred years. These intermediate districts themselves interlock with and impinge upon the wilder and more picturesque areas which, whether they be the mountains and lakes of Maine, the White Mountains and lakes of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains and lakes of Vermont, the Adirondacks and the Catskills and the Alleghenies and their subordinate ranges, such as the Highlands of the Hudson and the Berkshires, or the sea, on the rocky south side of this ellipse and the great river valleys, all are part of a huge decorative background, as it were, for what even a conservative view-point must consider one of the most amazing population centres of the earth. The socionatural contrasts even within what might be called the rural, as well as the city, sections of this great ellipse are of a most extraordinary character. On the one hand taste, wealth, and luxury have everywhere crowded homes, villas, country houses, and country clubs, which have

commanded and evoked beauty and invested themselves with the finer amenities that ever concern themselves with the poesy of all outdoors; and, on the other hand, there are still the primitive stretches of sparsely settled communities, the untrodden woods, and the gloom of the forest primeval. One easily recalls, for comparison, in sweeping along the roads, be it by wood, or lake, or sea, the Imperial Roman period when from Pliny's numerous villas at Como to Caligula's palace at Capri every outlook was seized upon to yield the "bella vista," yet the general countryside with us, with its greater simplicities of home- and farmside, not forgetting the incredible loveliness of the college-side and the schoolside, is redolent of the kind of thing that years ago gave palm for rural picturesqueness to northwestern Europe and, particularly, to England itself. It is this truly rural and garden-like aspect of the countryside in this great ellipse which is worth while thinking about. For one hardly needs to take a brief for the greater and more extended and sublimer aspects of American scenery that have had their enthusiasts and apologists, whether one is dilating over Niagara, singularly out of fashion these days, or the Yellowstone National Park, or the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, or the Yosemite, or the Rockies, or even the great plains and the very mesas and deserts themselves. But, speaking of rural scenery only, one must admit that the countryside of England and the Continent, whether it be picturesque or otherwise, has an easy handicap of advantage in the glamour that belongs to all historic regions that are supersaturated with what might be called the overtones of human association. One, indeed, could well agree with Rupert Brooke that the Canadian Rockies, or our own, possess less interest for us than the Alps, since they, the Rockies, are almost a mere concrete panoramic appeal of rock and tree and ice, without the slightest element of human association to give them what might be called the literary value that belongs to the Alps by reason of their every aspect being shared by the great deeds of men and the peoples of all times running back to the very dawn of civilization; Hannibal, Cæsar,

and Napoleon give the most rugged vistas a magic that counts and cannot be duplicated.

However, in this inevitable comparison with this older humanized landscape, which is held up to us as the very model of all that is beautiful, those who dispose of the American rural countryside in one sentence, and declare it "insignificant"after viewing it apparently from the ugly suburban reaches of Long Island City and Far Rockaway-seem to forget that while the European and English landscapes considered as a whole enjoy this tremendous advantage of human associations, there is, also, another accidental advantage on the other side, which comes from climatic effects and particularly from the lighting effects of the high northern latitudes in which all those countries lie, the beauty of whose gardens, of whose greenswards, of whose woodland vistas we are continually hearing. Except in the mountainous regions not only is the European landscape an arranged and planted landscape, but these arranged and planted landscapes, planted and replanted for over thousands of years, and more than ploughed and watered with human blood and legendary associations, in the northwestern region are suffused with moistures and the mists, the low clouds and the frequent rains of an oceanic climate. Consequently, every aspect of landscape, even when most literal and commonplace, has an atmospheric glamour-misinterpreted by the casual as a subjective poetic effect

that comes from a low range of color and an indefiniteness of outline due to the absence of the sun and the prevalence of mist and fog and haze. Look at the contrast in latitudes, for, although latitudes do not condition climate, they do fix the place of the sun in the sky and all those effects that go with a high or a low sun! For instance, Avignon, in southern France, in the "Sunny South," as they see it, is in the latitude of Mount Washington. Moreover, all northern France, and all of England, Belgium, and Holland are many degrees north of the northern boundary of Vermont. England begins at latitude 50 north, and the famous lake region in England, praised by all the minstrels, is ten degrees further north than the waters of Lake Champlain that

lave Plattsburg. All these high latitudes of Europe, and it is the Europe in which landscape-painting has reached its highest development, have a very low arctic sun, even in the summer-time, with consequent long twilights, long dawns, long shadows at all times, the crepuscular and the gloaming effects never being very far away even from high noon, with a silvery diffused light from the ever-present clouds; while astronomic and climatic factors have brought it about that what is considered "the thing" in landscapepainting abroad is merely a matter of the literal external recipe, which, when depicted, passes for the effects of mood supposedly originating within man himself. The American countryside, which lies wholly within the lower latitudes, under a continental climate, cannot expect to equal these atmospheric enveilments. Yet it is this climatic softness of the other side, with its gray-green distances, its wet rain-washed foliage, its masked aerial perspective, that has been more or less the fashion in landscape art for many years. For under such climatic conditions even the most commonplace outlook takes on the character of a Corot or a Whistler, while it is the low sun that gives those remote enchanting prospects where "the long light shakes across the lakes" that we all grew up on in art and literature, and, thinking of which, we find our own scenery too near, too strong, too bright, too hard of outline. But, surprising as it may seem, even with these disadvantages, climatic and historic, the fact of the matter is, that the inherent and developed beauty of the eastern American landscape has come into its own and magnificently. This is not only proved by the unimpeachable evidence of the ravishing reaches found everywhere throughout this great ellipse-those around Williamstown, Mass., Raymond Recouly, the French publicist, noted, were "a caress to the eye"-but by the extraordinary fact, not dwelt upon by foreign observers, that it is through the interpretation of this scenery that American landscape art has triumphed in presenting the vernacular in terms of a real poesy. The American painter has done this despite the lack of a literary glamour and, more than that, despite the rather refrac

tory effects of the high sun, clear dry air, tremendous contrast of color, vivid sunshot green against blue skies of great intensity, of snow, under deep blue, glittering in a winter sunlight with a brilliancy that is unknown in northern Europe. These effects, quite unlike the gray vistas that have been accepted as the test of mood and subjective beauty in Europe, have made the way of the American painter and the American poet a hard one, but that both have triumphed without the adventitious aid of the legendary and mist-touched glamours, which Europe evokes to save the most commonplace of natural surroundings, is a double triumph and is shared by the landscape itself. Yet it is not wholly without its traditions or its humanizing aspects. The New England school of poetry, with Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell in the van, has celebrated its natural beauty and they knew it and loved it; and the Middle States writers, with Bayard Taylor glorifying the Kennett country, have not been far behind, with Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper throwing a golden veil of romance over the valley of the Hudson and the Catskills of such a character as not only to affect our imagination but also to give a rich literary background to one of the most admirable periods in American landscape art, the panoramic work of the early Hudson River School. This school of Cole, Durand, and Kensett and their followers, not only builded better than they knew for themselves, but, through the influences that finally produced an Inness, brought about that continuity in American landscape art that has needed nothing of the older schools of Europe to give it traditions or a reputation in the face of an achievement that has even dispossessed and supplanted the works of the Barbizon School in the current art sales in the auction galleries.

But what are the elements of this rural beauty with us that give our landscapes significance plus whatever value any vista gains from the human relationships of three hundred years and the historic and poetic incidents with which individual places are associated? In what does the American scene differ from rural Europe? Well, in a greater variety and wealth of

it depicts a familiar aspect of the Delaware River Valley scenery, tall buttonwoods, entwined to their very tops with the tendrilled grapes. The painting, with the mirror-like canal in the foreground and the rushing river and the great hills in the background, represents that rural loveliness and picturesqueness inherent in the works of the so-called Delaware Valley School of painters, with Redfield as the great interpreter of the winter scenery in the same region; of which school it has been said that they have made the farmlands of Bucks County take on the characteristics of the legendary glories of the

of the honeysuckle and the resinous breath of the sassafras and the spice-bush and the poplars and hemlocks and junipers and the hickories and magnolias and the sweet fern, be not enchantment, then there is no enchantment anywhere on this earth. If the Hobbema picture, too, suggests on the part of Europe a certain economy in trees and a scarcity of species, which is true of all the planted landscapes of England and the Continent, despite the reputation of the oaks and elms and beeches and lindens and ash-trees, it must be said that when H. W. Nevinson ran home to England in order, so he said, to