By the way, for those of you who may not know (I didn’t), Olmsted, the son of a Connecticut merchant, dropped out of college (supposedly due to sumac poisining) and his father bought him a farm on Staten Island in 1848. He had previously been employed as a seaman, merchant, and still as a journalist, which apperantly led to his 1850 trip to England. I find this interesting because a lot of the descriptions in Walks are about farming and the English people he runs into are surprised to find an American farmer so civilized. At that time, they apparently thought we were barbarous savages or something like that. His mere visit changed some people’s view of America. His descriptions are very detailed and, as you can imagine, picturesque. Most interesting to me are his descriptions of the English rural and town landscape.
