not suppose that any man ever built a
house, without finding in the progress of it obstacles that were
unforeseen, and something that might have been better planned; things
teazing and vexatious when they come, however the mind may have been
made up at the outset to a general expectation of the kind.

With respect to the grounds, you have there the advantage of being in
good hands, namely, those of Nature; and, assuredly, whatever petty
crosses from contrariety of opinion or any other cause you may now meet
with, these will soon disappear, and leave nothing behind but
satisfaction and harmony. Setting out from the distinction made by
Coleridge which you mentioned, that your house will belong to the
country, and not the country be an appendage to your house, you cannot
be wrong. Indeed, in the present state of society, I see nothing
interesting either to the imagination or the heart, and, of course,
nothing which true taste can approve, in any interference with Nature,
grounded upon any other principle. In times when the feudal system was
in its vigor, and the personal importance of every chieftain might be
said to depend entirely upon the extent of his landed property and
rights of seignory; when the king, in the habits of people's minds, was
considered as the primary and true proprietor of the soil, which was
granted out by him to different lords, and again by them to their
several tenants under them, for the joint defence of all; there might
have been something imposing to the imagination in the whole face of a
district, testifying, obtrusively even, its dependence upon its chief.
Such an image would have been in the spirit of the society, implying
power, grandeur, military state, and security; and, less directly, in
the person of the chief, high birth, and knightly education and
accomplishments; in short, the most of what was then deemed interesting
or affecting. Yet, with the exception of large parks and forests,
nothing of this kind was known at that time, and these were left in
their wild state, so that such display of ownership, so far from taking
from the beauty of Nature, was itself a chief cause of that beauty being
left unspoiled and unimpaired. The _improvements_, when the place was
sufficiently tranquil to admit of any, though absurd and monstrous in
themselves, were confined (as our present Laureate has observed, I
remember, in one of his essays) to an acre or two about the house in the
shape of garden wit