Why did I give you such a lot of details with no idea that you would make direct use of them & which I would not for the world have you give the public! The answer seems to be that I meant to shovel facts before you, in gross bulk and leave you to draw deductions of a generalizing sort as you might see would fit any motive that you might adopt. You did not seem to be taking that view but I hope that what you may feel it necessary to write about me personally will after all be short.

The main facts seem to me to be these: 1st That a disposition was born with me, or early became fixed, to vagrancy, to day-dreaming, to find my pleasure in an intellectually inactive or not consciously directed contemplation of natural scenery. Natural scenery being a very different thing from that to which the naturalist or the gardener directs his attention. 2d various circumstances tended to draw out and develop this disposition to reverie before natural scenery. Among them the habits of my father and (step-mother) and some other of my relatives, certain books that I chanced to read; the accident that led to the medical advice upon which for several years, when I should otherwise have been fitting for college I was allowed and encouraged to spend a great deal of time riding and walking upon rural roads and across country, to follow brooks under pretence of angling, roaming thro’ woods, across mountains and in meadows with a gun, or rowing or sailing upon a river or upon the sheltered sea coast of the Sound. The attempt to make me an engineer failed; the attempt to make a merchant of me failed because it was not my nature or in accord with my habits that it should succeed. The attempt to make a seaman of me failed because of my—delicacy of constitution? But while I was at sea all my contemplative habits, my disposition to reverie and daydreaming—day-dreaming being the soul of designing, continued and became more deep-seated. During my schooling for and my life as a farmer—about twelve years—I read a great deal and much that tended to establish sound foundations & of course I gained some practical knowledge of soils and tillage that told in my after professional work. The walk in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Holland & up the Rhine helped me to be discriminatingly and analytically observant of scenery.

There is a passage in the book I wrote about the first two months of this six months tramp (Walks & Talks) that might be quoted as showing the attitude of my mind at this time toward my later profession. It is at the opening of a very poor account (I have always been a bad writer) of the park at Eaton Hall, near Chester and it runs something in this way: “How fine must be the work of an artist who makes the outline—sketches of landscapes for the filling up [643]of which he calculates upon the operations of nature continuing many years afterwards, even after his death.”

The less that you find it indispensable to say about the book business the better. I wish that it could all be omitted; and, really, it is of little importance as accounting for the course of my professional career. This would be true also, of my experience with General Viellé, with Green and the park Commissioners. I hope there need be no reference to them. Can not all, important to your essential purpose, be generalized by reference to the political conditions of New York City at that time; the growing time of Tweed and the difficulty in which it placed any man engaged in trying to rightly direct a municipal work of art? The early Commissioners were really, as a whole a superior body of men; they gained the public’s confidence and taken altogether, they deserved it more than bodies of public servants in our cities often do. I hope that you will not fail to do justice to Vaux and to consider that he and I were one. I should have been nowhere but for his professional training.

The one fact of importance of this period with reference to what I assume to be the leading motive of your writing, was that the occasion came to me as a grand one for turning to fine use resources that had accumulated with me, which but for this occasion would have lain dormant—at best would have been of but little value to anyone but myself. Resources that had accumulated without my knowledge through living a somewhat vagabondish somewhat poetical life, and that I threw myself upon the occasion with more than ardor. The fact is that I had many reasons other than my love of the art, which, outlet being given, it was intense for giving myself to it; the hopelessness of my brother’s case; my broken-heartedness at his death, the mortification and undue anger caused by the commercial failure; a rapidly growing hatred of New York politicians with whom all my work on the park was a war. I was just in the mind to volunteer for a forlorn hope, and there was something else of which I have told you nothing and shall tell you nothing which made absorption in the work of the moment the more necessary for me. The service that I put into the Central Park, & so did Vaux and others a degree of devotion that no greed and no selfish ambition would have induced. Why—how I came to—does not concern the public. It is not necessary that you should fully understand it. The fact is that there was an artistic devotion in the early Central Park work such as a political work, short of war, seldom engages, and something of this fact it may be well the public should recognize. I have said enough to you for you to appreciate it.

Such a work under such a strain is educative. And when I ask myself why I give you particulars which should not be mentioned except in confidence the answer is that you might realize better this fact of intense education. I mean that I was forced by circumstances to think deeply about the roots of my affair, not to think in words and by conscious logical processes but so that I could lay hold of foundation principles.

In the six months that I was living in London, when in that miserable [644]book business, I had no more idea of ever being a park-maker than of taking command of the Channel fleet. But hardly a day passed in which I did not pass thro’ a park, few in which I did not ramble in one a little. On holidays I went to Kew and Bushy and Richmond & Windsor. I came to look at public grounds critically but not at all from the official point of view or a gardener’s point of view but from that of a citizen seeking rest, refreshment, recreation in them. So it happened that when Central Park was to be laid out & managed it is quite possible that I was more intimate with public parks and had a better understanding of what they should be than any other man of American birth and breeding. Vaux was born and bred in London and as an architectural student had travelled well in England and on the continent. He knew the London parks even better than I did.

There is a department of our business of which I said nothing to you, that of the preparation of what I must call suburbs, using the word, however, not as applying to the outskirts of towns but of a place not fully urban, whether closely connected with a town like Brookline, or seperated from town-like conditions in the case of Lenox. The special character of the place depends in each case on the combination it provides of a certain degree of the conditions of health and of ruralistic beauty of a loosely built New England village with a certain degree of the material and social advantages of a town. A village with houses set back and well apart with yards and gardens and orchards seperating one from another; with broad tree-shaded streets, laid out with grace and some respect for natural topography, with sewers and side walks and macadamized wheelways and small greens and commons, all with a view to pleasing compositions of natural and artificial objects. We have made plans for forming or improving several such—for making as much, I suppose, as 150 miles of such suburban roads of this rus-urban design. I will ask John to send you prints of some of them. The subject may be considered with recognition of the fact that with the modern tendency to the concentration of population in towns there is also, at last, a tendency evident, with people who require to have the use of the advantages of towns for commercial and broadly social purposes, educational purposes &c. to dwell under conditions differing from those to which, until lately, the word urban would be applied. Railways, telegraphs, telephones, and for suburbs near commercial centres, street railways, have nourished this tendency, of the results of which what we now see is but a premonitory effect.

It is to be considered that the general tendency of real estate speculation with us has been to lay out all the outskirt regions of flourishing towns with the idea that those to whom the lots are to be sold will be largely influenced to buy by regard for the chance that in good times these lots will be wanted for an expansion of the town in close solid blocks and that when the good time arrives [645]the value of the land for town-like building purposes will have advanced many times and all such “improvements” as shall, in the mean time, have been made upon it will be swept away.

Having this result in view land near our growing towns has, on purely commercial principles, been laid out in rectangular blocks and in a manner that compels the destruction of whatever topographical advantages it may have possessed for rus-urban, domestic purposes. With the multiplication of conveniences for transportation, by the introduction of railways, telephones, expresses and grocer’s carts, the problem comes of reconciling a measure of town convenience with a measure of rural village beauty and conditions of health. This problem comes both in the outskirts of towns and in regions remote from towns having rural charms gradually becoming a resort for town’s people. With the advance of this tendency comes an increased estimate of the value of ponds, streams, ledges and other natural features of scenery and a dislike to have their beauty destroyed in order to preserve straightness and rectangularity in street plans or by the introduction of retaining walls, iron bridges, railway embankments, ice-houses &c. So gradually there is coming to be a value—a market value—for good, artistic work of design with the motive of reconciling the requirements of convenience for a community with the preservation and development of conditions of rural beauty; for good judgment in this respect; good calculation of what will result in the future from various operations of the present. What we are devising in respect to Jamaica Pond and the shore of Roxbury Bay are examples.

I have been much struck by the degree in which many intelligent and well-informed persons have wrong ideas of the education and qualities that are needed for doing or appreciating good work in our profession; more especially as shown in the assumption that they are mainly the same that are needed in the doing or appreciating of what is needed in the art of the confectioner, the millener, the jeweler, calico printer or gardener. Most of what I have lately said to you has been said in a clumsy and diffusive way with an idea of aiding you to clues toward an answer to the question: What are these qualities and how did they come to be drawn out in the degree they have been in this man? Having this question in view more especially with regard to his early education I think it notable that so little came of deliberate intention or by instruction; so much by unintended education of circumstances—by unconscious influence received through close and docile association with persons of an untrained, unsophisticated, simple but not unintelligent habit of looking for pleasure to contemplation of rural and picturesque scenery; second, through the effect of being thrown for several years into an unusual intimacy with certain forms of rural scenery and through a habit of day-dreaming about rural scenery, a habit favorable to poetic moods and the development of a designing habit. This, of course, twisting in with a certain degree of native intelligence, activity of mind and what is called organizing, administrative and executive ability, of which a large part is a catholic sympathy. Add some advantage of that kind [646]of liberal education which comes thro’ fortunate association with a few persons of superior mental quality. Among the latter I made no mention of one to whom I owe a good deal, my uncle Law, from whom came my middle name. Being childless he had been a second father to my (own) mother. There is a fine photograph from a good portrait of him and his wife at my house. (My own mother was his wife’s younger sister). I was much at his house. He was a scholar, often reciting Latin poetry to me, (I had a good drill in Latin as a small boy) often reading the Latin poets for his own edification. He was a personal friend of Whittier and upon occasion wrote verses himself, as upon the death of my mother, of which he gave me copies. He cultivated a garden, and I had beds in it. He loved me and I cared much to have his good opinion.

I have been writing under great difficulties of interruption and distracting circumstances. It is not yet a very good time to see the Exposition, and I am surprised that good people like it as much as they do and find so little fault with its backwardness and incompleteness. I am intending to go tomorrow to Biltmore.

Sincerely Yours