I wrote you yesterday and late last night recevd yours of June 3dwhich gives me extreme pleasure. We are so wide apart in base of habit and education, that I don’t feel as if I should do anything but muddle if I tried to discuss the matters with you. If I don’t wholly adopt or agree with all you say, at least I respect it very thoroughly and feel that I have not altogether done justice to your position heretofore.

I do not wholly sympathize with your views of the guild of art. I think you are a little idolatrous and in danger of losing sight of the end in devotion to the means but I am inclined to go with you,—at least, after you.

[421]

As to what I shall do personally, there are a good many elements in the case which must be out of your reach.

I can’t leave here merely because I think I am more wanted elsewhere or should do better elsewhere. I must have my conclusive reasons for breaking my engagement with the Company, with its stock-holders & bondholders, for throwing up a responsibility which is laid upon me, for throwing up plans in which I have invested largeley; for carting my family back after having just acclimated them here &c, &c, &c, &c.

I, all the time, expect that circumstances will soon settle that question but I don’t quite feel that it is settled and that I am free, yet. I feel that having taken such a long jump I mustn’t jump back again hastily or with my eyes shut. I don’t think that a mere prospect of living more pleasantly, of engaging in an occupation that is attractive to me, justifies me in backing out of this place which don’t suit me. I shall not do it because I want to go to New York for any reason, but, if I do go, because I cannot justly and with proper self-regard, remain here. What I shall do when I leave is a secondary question.

Very likely before this reaches you the primary question will be settled. But so I have been thinking for several months, & still the stock of the Company indicates no change for death or life.

Any day I may decide the question of leaving this place. But if I left tomorrow I should not go to New York for two or three months, and if there was no special reason for going, (as, if you engage on the Brooklyn work, there would be I suppose,) I might remain here longer than that; depending on the business offering. I’m bound to go thro’ with the college, and I may want to do something more which would pay expenses of living here a while. We have over $10,000 invested here & it wants watching. I have borrowed $5000, for which I am paying 1½ prct a month at this time, and I have funds on their way from the East, and the more abruptly I have to wind up all my strands, the worse it will be for me. It will cost me nearly $2000 to break up here and get fairly settled in New York, besides cost of furniture &c there, and you will remember the fire pretty well cleaned us out.

I refer to this because your last letter does not look as if you expected either the Brooklyn or the Central Park business to be pressing, and it may be very important to me—indeed may wholly change my plans, to know exactly when it would be necessary to your purposes that I should be in New York. It looks to me as if I should go to New York last of September or October, if I go, but I want to be free longer than that if there should be occasion—especially if by staying I could drive the San Franciscans into undertaking a park. I should like too to be free to do more gratuitous work for the Yo Semite than I shall be likely to if I cut away in September.

[422]

Therefore telegraph me if your demand is pressing for any special period. I mean to hold myself as free as possible, and to have my business so I can wind it up in a hurry. I have changed my investments in a great measure already for this purpose. Still it would be better always to wind them up deliberately and with a free range of the market. I think that if the Company fails to pay me my salary, what I shall have earned by Landscape work, before November, added to the dividends I shall get, and a few odds and ends will save me from cutting into my accumulation, until I have to pay the travelling & freight expenses of our return, which are very formidable. I want to manage if possible to get them out of the Mariposa Company, but can’t see it. (Only if they don’t fail, and they do discharge or fail in their contract with me, then I mean to try for it.)

P.S. If you go to Europe, I wish you would try to see the Villa Montmorency near Paris—a neighborhood park, on the general principles (socially) of Llewellen, but different Landscaparchitecturally. I wish also you could get a plan in detail of any road (drive or walk) with borders in the picturesque style, not, that is, a road through a park, and not a road planted formally—as an avenue. The Avenue de’l Imperatrice is an example, but the border in that case is so wide that near the road it is open and lawn like, if I recollect rightly. I want to see the best European example of what you wanted along the road side west of the pond, but with a broader border—as you would have it I mean, if you were to lay it out over again, and you had rows of buildings, where the water is, to be concealed.

I am all the time bothered with the miserable nomenclature of L.A. Landscape is not a good word, Architecture is not; the combination is not. Gardening is worse. I want English names for ferme and village ornée— street &c ornée—but ornée or decorated is not the idea—it is artified & rural artified—which is not decorated merely. The art is not gardening nor is it architecture. What I am doing here in Cala especially, is neither. It is the sylvan art, fine-art in distinction from Horticulture, Agriculture or Sylvan useful art. We want a distinction between a nursery-man and a market gardener & an orchardist, and an artist. And the planting of a street or road—the arrangment of village streets—is neither Landscape Art, nor Architectural Art, nor is it both together, in my mind—of course it is not, & it will never be in the popular mind. Then neither park nor garden, nor street, road, avenue or drive, nor boulevard, apply to a sylvan bordered and artistically arranged system of roads, sidewalks and public places,—playgrounds, parades etc. There is nothing of park, garden or architecture, or landscape in a parade ground—not necessarily, [423]

Bird’s-Eye View of Central Park, 1863

I like what you say of the spirit and ways of the Brooklyn Park Commissioners & particularly admire your way of putting your business at the start upon a good foundation with them.