a grove the trees are
generally well formed, many of them being nearly perfect in their
proportions. Their shadows are cast separately upon the ground, which is
green beneath them as in an orchard. If we look upon them from a near
eminence, we observe a variety of outlines, and may identify the
different species by their shape, while in the forest we see one
unbroken mass of foliage. A wild-wood is frequently converted into a
grove by clearing it of undergrowth and leaving the space a grassy lawn.
It may then yield us shade, coolness, and other agreeable sensations of
a cultivated wood, but the individual trees always retain their gaunt
and imperfect shapes.

The greater part of the woodland of this country partakes of the
characters of both forest and grove, exhibiting a pleasant admixture of
each, combined with pasture and thicket. In Great Britain the woods are
chiefly groves and parks: a wild-wood of spontaneous growth is now rare
in that country, once renowned for the extent and beauty of its forests.
Most of our American woods are fragments of forest, particularly in
the Western States, where they stand out prominently, and deform
the landscape by presenting a perpendicular front of naked pillars,
unrelieved by any foliage. They remind one of those houses, in the city,
which have been cut asunder to widen a street, leaving the interior
rooms and partition-walls exposed to view. These sections of wood are
the grand picturesque deformity of a country lately cleared. In the
older settlements, a recent growth of wood has in many instances come
up outside of these palisades, serving in a measure to conceal their
baldness.

The most lovely appearances in landscape are caused by the spontaneous
growth of miscellaneous trees, some in dense assemblages and some in
scattered groups, with here and there a few single trees standing in
open space. Such is the scenery of considerable portions of the Atlantic
States, both North and South. These varied assemblages of wood and
shrubbery are the characteristic features of the landscape in the
older villages of New England, and indeed of all the States that were
established before the Revolution. But the New-England system of
farming--so much abhorred by those who wish to bring agriculture to
such a state of improvement as shall make it profitable exclusively
to capitalists--has been more favorable to the sylvan beauty of the
landscape than that of any other part of the continent.