untain-side, through or
along which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still
nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters
and roses, which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his
care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up
against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,
walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of it?
consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few impounded
herbs?

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,
about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our
town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may
see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely
_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you _look_
for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether
you stand on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will think for
threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sear and
brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are
out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds
and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye
itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and
widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of
the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our
lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in
political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not
cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in
the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,--not a grain more. The
actual objects which one man will see from a particular hill-top are
just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are
different The Scarlet Oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go
forth. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of
it, take it into our heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else.
In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first, the idea, or image, of a
plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this
locality,--no nearer than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I
go thinking of it, and expecting it unconsciously, and