I have your note of the 18th instant. Perhaps before I write the very little I can in answer to your specific question, it may be useful to your friend if I offer a few general observations.

If a young man has an unquestionable bent toward my calling, I have every disposition to encourage him, for I have a warm hope as to what it will become in the future and I know that it is possible for it to take vastly higher rank than it now does in the minds of superior men. In my time, it has been becoming a profession and we in our office are doing all we can to make it so. But unless a man is so situated that it will not be a great hardship for him to be unable to earn a fair livelihood for quite as long a series of years as are generally before one entering the other crowded professions, I cannot encourage him to take it up. This not because there are as yet a great many well-prepared landscape architects, but because there are so few people who understand their need of this service, and who are prepared to employ them with due respect for their professional claims. Also, because there has lately been a little rush to us of educated men to ask how they shall proceed to make themselves Landscape Architects.

Among these, there have been half a dozen Harvard students, with a few graduates of other colleges. Some of them have given as their reason for seeking advice, the alleged fact that they were artistically inclined and were fond of flowers and gardens, which is a direction of artistic inclination rather un-fitting a man for our work. At least, it suggests that he will care more for beautiful objects and scenes than for scenery in composition, which is the true landscape inclination. Also, the idea seems to be common that it is easier to acquire what knowledge and skill is necessary, and to obtain remunerative employment in our business, than in that of the better organized professions; Architecture and Engineering, for example. As far as I can judge, it is not so.

There have been two men who, after having been graduated from Harvard, where they were in Norton’s classes, and after subsequently taking special courses of preparatory study for a year or more, have come as pupils [369]into our office, where they have found the work so different from that they expected that they have concluded they were not suited to it and left before the second year.

We have had others, similarly prepared, who have taken great pleasure in it and are likely to be fairly successful.

Our advice to those whom we can encourage usually is that, (after a college course), they should take special courses in Architecture, Engineering and Drawing, free-hand and mechanical, at the Technological Institute, (or, if Harvard men, partly as post graduate students at Cambridge), and courses in Botany and Horticulture at the Bussey and Arnold Arboretum schools; at the same time, visiting the Art Museum, and otherwise making themselves familiar with good pictures and good architecture. After that, we put them to such work as they can do in our office, if we can find room for them, and they travel with us (at their own expense) and read under our advice for two or three years. After that, they generally make a tour of foreign study. This was Charles Eliot’s course, for example, and I should say that at this time, being I suppose, eight years from college, he stood in a business way in about the position that a man of equal talent and fitness for his profession, at the same age, usually stands in Medicine, Architecture or Engineering. If better than the average man, better because abler and more fortunate in social respects, not because it is easier to get on in the profession he has taken. But he has, from the first, been fond of his work, has a real enjoyment of scenery, and has never found the drudgery required of him irksome.

As to the prospects of a young man in straightened circumstances, they are also much what they would be in Medicine, Building or Engineering, with a difference in two respects; first, that Landscape Architecture is much less of a “staple” business and second, that there are fewer prizes, or chances of making a fortune in it; none, indeed.

There is a want of competent men for subordinate positions—much greater than in Architecture, for instance. That is to say, in architectural works, there are always competent builders to be had to take many cares of business that, in our case, must be assumed by the designing heads. There is much in our affairs for which specifications cannot be drawn, upon which a contractor can be held to do satisfactory work. What the profession wants is competent foremen, undertakers and office assistants to whom details of design can be delegated as by a chief Architect to his office assistant, and details of fieldwork to resident superintendents, clerks of works and foremen. Such men, possessing adequate knowledge in Horticulture, and who would be good second mates at sea, are practically not to be had, while men of corresponding fitness in Architecture or in Engineering are to be had in troops. But the sort of service thus suggested to be needed is not the sort to which a young man can very confidently be invited, because the rewards of it, and chances of promotion from it, do not promise to be enough to justify the time and outlay that would be needful to due qualifications. Our people are ready to spend millions for skilled [370]direction in building of houses or of railroads, where they yet grudge hundreds for the reconciliation of convenience with fitness and beauty of local scenery.

I really do not know enough of the Stevens Institute to give an opinion upon your question. I suppose it to be more distinctly a school of high science in application to Engineering than anything else. A Landscape Architect needs to be fairly well-informed in Engineering and in Architectural Science, but he does not need to be an Engineer and Architect. We study, sometimes very laboriously, engineering and architectural schemes to fit into our plans, but we do so only to establish conditions of the problems that we require Engineers and Architects to resolve. We always refuse to be independently responsible for these plans; always insist that Surveyors, Engineers and Architects shall be employed and be responsible for that which is distinctly technical to them. It has appeared to me that the training of an Engineer was most adverse to facility in the exercise of constructive imagination, which is the central motor of our work. A good Engineer is nearly always impatient of indefiniteness, unlimitedness and mystery which is the soul of landscape.

I can only say that, if a choice were possible, one could, I should suppose, obtain a better preparatory education for entering upon the study of Landscape Architecture, at the Massachusetts Technological Institute, getting what he could at the same time from the Arnold Arboretum and the Bussey School of Horticulture, than from the Stevens Institute.

I have written at length to fairly show how I look upon the root of your question. I am sorry to think that what I have written must be unsatisfactory to your friend.

I followed you and Norton and Child to the grave of Lowell the other day and was sorry I could not take your hand without obtruding myself.

Mr. Ransom of the Heliotype (American Architect) Company gave me the enclosed portraits to-day, and although I presume you have them, thinking you possibly had not, and did not know the original daguerreotypes, I asked for another set that I might send them to you, for they are surely very interesting. Ransom could not give me the date nearer than “1840 – 1850.” Lowell’s face must have changed much more than his wife’s before I saw them, which I did, with their little girl, at their teatable at Elmwood, most charmingly, in, I think, 1855. Was it not upon your introduction? I think it must have been, for he was very kind to me and fluent and domestic and soberly whimsical, and I have ever since been looking up to him from a distance lovingly, and have been really saddened by his death, little as I have known him personally.

With kind remembrances to Mrs Curtis and to Norton,

Sincerely Yours