At the South,
especially, where agriculture is carried on in large plantations, we see
wide fields of tillage, and forest groups of corresponding size. But the
small and independent farming of New England--as favorable to general
happiness as it is to beautiful scenery--has produced a charming variety
of wood, pasture, and tillage, so agreeably intermixed that one is never
weary of looking upon it. The varied surface of the landscape, in the
uneven parts which are not mountainous, has increased these advantages,
producing an endless multitude of those limited views which may be
termed picturesque.

In no other part of the country are the minor inequalities of surface so
frequent as in New England: I allude to that sort of ruggedness which is
unfavorable to any "mammoth" system of agriculture, and plainly evinces
that Nature and Providence have designed this part of the country for
free and independent labor. Here little meadows, of a few acres in
extent, are common, encircled by green pasture hills or by wood. A
rolling surface is more favorable to grandeur of scenery; but nothing
is more beautiful than landscape formed by hills rising suddenly out of
perfect levels. As it is not my present purpose to treat of landscape in
general, I will simply remark that the barrenness of a great part of the
soil of the Eastern States is favorable to picturesque scenery. This may
seem a paradoxical assertion to those who can see no beauty except
in universal fatness; but unvaried luxuriance is fatal to variety of
scenes, though it undoubtedly encourages the development of individual
growth. An agreeable intermixture of various sylvan assemblages is one
of the effects of a barren soil, containing numerous fertile tracts.
Not having in general sufficient strength to produce timber, it covers
itself with diverse groups of vegetation, corresponding with the
varieties of soil and surface. Thus, in a certain degree, we are obliged
to confess that beauty springs out of Nature's deficiencies.

We live in a latitude and upon a soil, therefore, which are favorable
to the harmonious grouping of vegetation. As we proceed southward, we
witness a constant increase of the number of species gathered together
in a single group. Nature is more addicted at the North to the habit of
classifying her productions and of assembling them in uniform phalanxes.
The painter, on this account, finds more to interest the eye and to
employ his pencil in the pictu