I write in this way because I am in bed. Excuse me. I always have to spend at least a day or two in bed when I come here. It seems to be a matter of acclimation to the rarified air of the mountain region. The trouble this time is mild but enforces caution if I am to reach Cambridge on the 28th. It is a notable circumstance {that} at the same time that Burnham and I go to Harvard to receive honors for our professions, Hunt goes to England to receive his medal.

The most interesting general fact of my life seems to me to be that it was not as a gardener, a florist, a botanist or as one in any way specially interested in plants and flowers as such or specially susceptible to the beauty of flowers and plants that I was drawn to the work which is to give me the Harvard distinction. (I am ignorant and unwise and inept in that field and largely dependent on others) The root of all my good work is an early respect for, regard and enjoyment of scenery (the word tells much better of the fact than landscape) and extraordinary opportunities of cultivating susceptibility to the power of scenery. Not so much grand or sensational scenery as scenery [654]of a more domestic order. Scenery to be looked upon contemplatively and which is provocative of musing moods. I think that I was largely educated for my profession by the enjoyment which my father and mother (step-mother) took in loitering journeys; in afternoon drives on the Connecticut meadows. This at first, helping to give me a bent, which, when book study was restricted by the trouble of my eyes, and when I had chanced to get some reading of Price and Gilpin, led me, in long and leisurely tramps and visits to friends on farms, to take a more intelligent, discriminating, analytical and cultivated interest in such scenery. So the habit thus begun to be formed led me, when I came to visit parks & promenades abroad to {view} them, for a time, less from the point of view of a member of society, than as an amateur of scenery and so to look upon trees and plants and weeds less from regard to their beauty as such, than from regard to their value as elements of compositions of scenery. To look upon roads and walks in parks, correspondingly, as {…} according to their {…} through the use of which scenery was to be enjoyed. I believe that I have before said something about this. I am inclined to urge it because so rarely do people discriminate between a love of nature, such as be shown in admiration of flowers in a vase, or even in admiration for a hortus siccus or a botanic garden, and a love of nature such as used to lead my father and mother to take quiet drives upon meadow and wood land roads, for the most part regarding the scenery silently and never in a way to lead to exclamations—My mother, by the way, used to have a very unusual number of wild plants in her garden, both bushes and herbs, gathered with her own hands, sometimes with my help, when I was a very small boy. She regularly carried a basket and a trowel for gathering plants, in our journeyings.

I have often thought there was less regard for {scenery} and consequently for landscape architecture now than then, and been inclined to trace the loss to modern methods of travel. A man in a hurry; a man moving fast, cannot enjoy scenery contemplatively. Scenery is enjoyed not because it is in itself beautiful but because contemplating it quietly the mind is led into a musing mood—a poetic mood, perhaps. Modern means of travel are most unfavorable to the enjoyment of scenery. The longer one lives in a place, the more he becomes accustomed to its scenery & to enjoy it without thinking or talking about it, the more influence it has upon him.

I am not disposed to under-value the scientific or the “practical” side of the profession. But in seeking for a reason why Harvard and why the Century should do what is proposed, it seems to me that it must be found in the fact of a cultivated sensitiveness to the sentiment of scenery, and that the value of any biography of F.L.O. must turn on the manner and degree in which it draws attention to the class of circumstances by which in early life he was led to look for his pleasure largely to leisurely quiet, unsystematic familiar intercourse with natural scenery. I do not express my idea quite correctly. I cannot. That is where I fail. That, if you get the idea by review of the facts in which it lies, is what you can do so much better. But I may suggest it again in this way. I have [655]not been a man of leisure, have not been a contemplative man (in the way of Isaac Walton) with regard to matters of art and literature, but I was so placed and circumstanced that with reference to scenery I was a man of leisure and was indolently contemplative at a period of life when most men are held very closely to the study of books or scientific observation.

I don’t like to be talking so much of myself. I do so only that you may better see how in the guise of a biographical statement, you can educate the public to a better understanding of what the art in its essence is, that I profess; a love for and intelligent cultivated regard for scenery—commonly called with danger of a confusion of ideas—landscape. I purposely do not say “natural scenery,” because the association of farm houses and barns, of smoke and roads, and the planted elms of village streets and door yards with natural elements of scenery was an essential element of that of which my early life was an unconscious study. Herein lies the lesson that I would have you teach, that study and industry are not all that are wanted for education.

But of course the more important end is to increase the respect of the Amn public for the art—to show that it is an Art, and that appreciation of and power to work in it is not an accident of birth; that evy man does not possess it, and that those qualities & habits by means of which success in the accumulation of wealth & social & political strength—those of the practical man, whether banker or alderman, are not the qualities that shd give them the confidence so many are disposed to use, in overruling & superceding those of an artist.

The main question is: Should L. Architecture be regarded as an art and a profession, or as a matter of common sense in wh. one man’s ideas are of equal weight with another’s? The less you make of me, except as a text, the more of the essence of the art, and the need of the profession in American Society & civilization the better—

Sincerely Yours