HUDSON RIVER BRACKETED.

SUMMARY.

A NOVEL.

(Thomas Downing, the American landscape architect, in his Landscape Gardening (published in 1845) divides the architectural styles into the Grecian, Chinese, Gothic, the Tuscan, or Italian villa, style, and the Hudson River Bracketed.)

Vance Weston, a clever boy from Euphoria, Ill., has been ill, and is sent (at 19, just after graduating from the local College of Euphoria) to spend a few weeks with some relations of his mother's, at Paul's Landing, on the Hudson.

Vance has seen about him only change and success — both incessant. He was born at Advance, Nebraska (hence his Christian name.) His father, a farmer who becomes a real-estate speculator, sells his property at Advance at a big rise, and the family moves to Success, Wisconsin, and thence to Euphoria. Each move is the result of a new and more successful real-estate deal, and each house they move into is more fully fitted than the last with plumbing, electricity and every kind of labour-saving mechanical device. Vance has never seen a house that was not new, with enamel paint, a vacuum cleaner,

4.

training tends to exclude, or at least to minimize, rushes in through
the million channels of art, and history, and human beings of another
civilization.

I cannot give more details yet. But the canvas will be
broad and full of figures. Vance Weston becomes a writer — literary
critic and novelist — and dies young, full of the awe of the world's
wonder and beauty.

HUDSON RIVER BRACKETED.

SUMMARY.

A NOVEL.

(Thomas Downing, the American landscape architect, in
his landscape Gardening (published in 1845) divides the
architectural styles into the Grecian, Chinese, Gothic, the
Tuscan, or Italian villa, style, and the Hudson River Bracketed.)

Vance Weston, a clever boy from Euphoria, Ill., has
been ill, and is sent ( at 19, just after graduating from the local
College of Euphoria) to spend a few weeks with some relations of his
mother's, at Paul's Landing, on the Hudson.

Vance has seen about him only change and success — both
incessant. He was born at Advance, Nebraska (hence his Christian
name.) His father, a farmer who becomes a real-estate speculator,
sells his property at Advance at a big rise, and the family moves to
Success, Wisconsin, and thence to Euphoria. Each move is the result
of a new and more successful real estate deal, and each house they
move into is more fully fitted than the last with plumbing, electricity
and every kind of labour-saving mechanical device. Vance has never
seen a house that was not new, with enamel paint, a vacuum cleaner,

3.

assist at the weekly airing. On entering the overgrown grounds, where
the trees press close to the house, and old garden-seats and arbours
crumble under their damp shade, he is amazed and fascinated by the
sight of a house which is nearly a hundred years old (built in 1840),
and still has the air of being lived in. Willow Lawn is a perfect
example of the "Hudson River Bracketed" style, and on a table in the
drawing-room Vance finds Thomas Downing's book on Landscape Gardening,
in which there is a steel-engraving of the house, and a lyrical
description of it and its grounds. Everything inside the house is un-
touched, and the boy sees for the first time old-fashioned furniture
and carpets, portraits and miniatures dating from the 18th and even
the 17th century — and a "gentleman's library" of books — real books;
most of the French and English classics, and the early nineteenth
century literature of the two countries. Lying on the table beside
Downing's volume he finds Coleridge's Poems, and opens the volume
at Kubla Khan. He reads it, and falls into a sort of rapture. Willow
Lawn represents to him The Past (something he had never heard of),
with all its accumulated riches of art and wisdom, and history and
romance. "Hudson River Bracketed" typifies the Parthenon, Notre Dame,
all the great architectures of the past. He touches The Past with his
actual bodily hands, and its magic pours into his blood.

He goes to New York, gets a small job on a newspaper, tries
to write, fails, and then succeeds. He gets taken to Europe, travels,
sees the countries he has dreamed of, has happy and unhappy adventures,
and comes back to his land with new eyes.

I want to try to draw the experiences of an unusually intelli-
gent modern American youth, of average education and situation, on whom
the great revelation of the Past, which everything in modern American

4.

training tends to exclude, or at least to minimize, rushes in through
the million channels of art, of history, and of human beings of another
and higher civilization.