building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

merged within this framework through the use of a factory‐in‐the‐forest
image. In 1825, the editor of the Essex Gazette emphasized the harmony
between the factories and the natural landscape at Lowell. "It seemed,"
he wrote, "to be a song of triumph and exultation at the successful
union of nature with the art of man, in order to make her contribute to
the wants and happiness of the human family." After two decades of
urban growth, however, it appeared that instead of blending with
nature, the city was about to overwhelm it. In 1841, a mill‐girl poet
wrote: "Who hath not sought some sylvan spot/ where art, the spoiler,
ventures not." 229
Cracks in the system and in the speculative layout of the town would only become
visible at a later stage. Meanwhile, in the 1840s, the idea of a Lowell capable of
mediating between the industrial and the natural world had finally declined by
then, and the ideas for a cemetery park rapidly became popular in the most
industrialised and most technologically advanced town of America. In 1841,
celebrations were held for the opening of the cemetery/park near the River
Concord, built according to a layout of romantic inspiration prepared by George P.
Worcester. The project envisaged roads and paths winding among existing oak trees
and newly planted flowers and trees. The benchmark was once again Mount
Auburn cemetery [Figure 100]and the Père‐Lachaise cemetery, a garden later used
only for burials.
All these experiences connected to the so‐called rural cemeteries movement are
also indirectly linked to the transcendentalist culture. It is especially important to
note how Ralph Waldo Emerson, in those very same decades, turned his attention
to the world of nature, in the belief that man could experience the truth directly
from nature. He recognised Nature as a useful, spiritual essence for man, both from
a philosophical and practical point of view. To confirm this, Emerson spoke in 1838
to the final year students of the Faculty of Theology of Cambridge (The Divinity
School Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College),
a short
distance from Mount Auburn, and expressed a radiant analogy between the “breath
of life” and nature. Therefore, a religious meaning of American Protestant origin can
also be identified in the way more importance is given to the elements in the
cemetery, which are connected to the life of the visitors rather than to memories of
the dead.
229 Ibid., pp.199‐200
139