I send you herewith a photographic view in Spring Grove Cemetery which I think will answer your purpose. Mr Strauch sends me with it a series of smaller views chiefly of monuments but among them there are two or three over the same lake, one of which you may perhaps find better adapted to your page. He also sends an account of Spring Grove Cemetery printed by the Association. I have marked in the Table of Contents the parts which I think likely to be most useful to you and a few passages in each of these parts. Near the close there is a brief account of the more important rural cemeteries of the United States.

The course first adopted in forming our cemeteries, as at Mount Auburn and Greenwood and till recently universally followed was to take a body of wooded land, open roads through it, divide the spaces between the roads in “lots”, sell the lots and leave their owners to decorate them according to their fancy. It has been customary for the owners to mark their boundaries with walls, posts & chains, hedges or otherwise, and to plant trees, shrubs, vines and flowers within them, each owner according to his taste & knowledge or want thereof. Graves were made and monuments set up according to the taste and means of each lot owner, and much as in an English Church yard, except that a stronger inclination has here been manifest to extravagant outlay in this respect.

The result for a time, and particularly when compared with our older burial grounds, was very pleasing.

But I must say that it was never altogether satisfactory and the older and more crowded the ground, the more time operates upon the hedges and [136] flower beds and posts and chains and Thujas and Spruces the further it is from being so.

I am giving you my strictly private opinion and for the purpose of a caution, which may be quite unnecessary, against the wholesale praise of the American Cemetery. And the more confidently because you seem to dislike the sticking of objects of architecture or sculpture upon a ground of a natural character or ground making pretensions that way, and to the breaking of its surface even with objects of gardening art. You dislike it, I detest it, and nothing has given me more pleasure in a long time than the article from the Saturday Review which you quoted lately which indicated that fashion was beginning to set against bedding art, which, as far as I can judge is ruin to the art of composing landscape effects. (At the same time when you come here I expect to convince you that the arches in the Central Park were desireable and at any rate that not one of them was introduced as you were led to suppose for purpose of decoration.) But as to the Cemeteries, you will see, how impossible, under the conditions I have described, any breadth or repose or simplicity of landscape character must be; how inevitable the opposite qualities in a high degree. And yet if art should do anything in a place of rest for our dead it should be to produce an impression of restfulness. How it is to be accomplished as a general rule near great towns where land has a high value, while we hold to our present habits, is more than I can yet tell. I do not think I could layout a burial place without making conditions about the monuments such as I fear few but Quakers would be willing to accept. But when I first saw Spring Grove Cemetery I found the problem more nearly solved by the taste and tact of Mr Strauch than I had ever expected to see it. Parts of Spring Grove would be a very beautiful pleasure ground, with moderately broad, simple and quiet effects, if the monuments were not to be seen; and the custom of having but one monumnt to a family, and of reserving near the drives and especially at the forks of the drives good spaces of ground to be planted and treated by the association, at least secures a very grateful limit to the degree in which these effects shall be injured by monuments.

The offensive parts which in our older cemeteries mark the boundaries of lots, even before they are sold, were by Mr Strauch set so that their tops were out of sight below the surface of the ground, though so near it as to be easily found when necessary. Nearly the whole of the implanted space of the Cemetery, even under the groves is a smooth surface of turf.

The principles of the Spring Grove plan—sometimes carried out more thoroughly, sometimes less so than there—have been generally recognized in those of our cemeteries established of late years.

I do not {know} what you saw of our cemeteries and you will pardon me for writing as if I imagined you had seen nothing of them. For the substantial information of my package you are solely indebted to Mr. Strauch.

We are at New York just beginning our spring planting and in the [137] colder exposures the frost is not yet out of the ground. In proper time I shall take care to meet your request for a view on the Central Park.