Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter 16.
Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed [...] in our common landscape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than sought for.
Raymond Williams, The Country and The City, (1973), p. 120:
A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation. It is possible and useful to trace the internal histories of landscape painting, landscape writing, landscape gardening and landscape architecture, but in any final analysis we must relate these histories to the common history of a land and its society. We have many excellent internal histories, but in their implicit and sometimes explicit points of view they are ordinarily part of that social composition of ht land - its distribution, its uses, and its control - which has been uncritically received and sustained, even into our own century, where the celebration of its achievements is characteristically part of an elegy for a lost way of life.
Pauline Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry (1983), p 3:
The Byronic hero reveals himself through his chosen landscape. The man for whom the alpine wilderness represents an ideal is implicitly rejecting all social values. He is Manfred on the Jungfrau [...] , a tormented figure on the heights; he is a solitary rebel, testing his courage and endurance against natural forces, communing with his own soul or with the Infinite, a supreme example of the egotistical sublime.
Raymond Williams, The Country and The City, p122
Parks, originally woodlands enclosed for preserving ad hunting game, were made in England from at latest the tenth century, and there was a significant increase in their number, in direct relation to the new country palaces, in the sixteenth century, Much of the enclosing of land and the building of houses was done at the expense of whole villages and cornfields that were cleared. The English landlords of the eighteenth century, following the same procedures, had these generations of predecessors in imposition and theft.
William Mason, ÔSonnet XII, to a Gravel WalkÕ , (1811)
Smooth, simple path! whose undulating line,
Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hal (1816) (Marmaduke Milestone (Humphry Repton) speaking)
One age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of ancient learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of metaphysics; a third has brought to perfection the science of astronomy; but it was reserved for the exclusive genius of the present times, to invent the noble art of picturesque gardening, which has given, as it were, a new tint to the complexion of nature, and a new outline to the physiognomy of the universe!
(Sir Patrick OÕPrism speaking)
Your system of levelling, and trimming, and clipping, and docking, and clumping, and polishing, and cropping, and shaving, destroys all the beautiful intricacies of natural luxuriance, and all the graduated harmonies of light and shade, melting into one another, as you see them on that rock over yonder. I never saw one of your improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at random of a pen, and a solitary animal here and there looking as if it were lost, that I did not think it was for all the world like Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
Ò [...] There have been two or three fine old trees cut down that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or any body of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down; the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill you know,Ó turning to Miss Bertram particularly as he spoke. [...]
Fanny, who was sitting on the other side of Edmund, exactly opposite Miss Crawford, and who had been attentively listening, now looked at him, and said in a low voice,
ÒCut down an avenue! what a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? ÔYe fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.ÕÓ
He smiled as he answered, ÔÒI am afraid the avenue stands a bad chance, Fanny.Ó
Peacock, Melincourt (1817)
The majestic forms and wild energies of Nature that surrounded her from her infancy, impressed their character on her mind, communicating to it all their own wildness, and more than their own beauty. Far removed from the pageantry of courts and cities, her infant attention was awakened to spectacles more interesting and more impressive: the misty mountain-top, the ash-fringed precipice, the gleaming cataract, the deep and shadowy glen, and the fantastic magnificence of the mountain clouds. The murmur of the woods, the rush of the winds, and the tumultuous dashings of the torrents, were the first music of her childhood. A fearless wanderer among these romantic solitudes, the spirit of mountain liberty diffused itself through the whole tenor of her feelings, modelled the symmetry of her form, and illumined the expressive but feminine brilliancy of her features: [...].
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995), p. 541
By 1780 connoisseurs of the frightful and the terrific, if they had been so enterprising, could have constructed an entire Grand Tour around the arcadian theme parks of the ancien regime. They could have gone to see the mechanical volcano at Wšrlitz, courtesy of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, timing their trip to see a nighttime ÔeruptionÕ so that, amidst the genuine fire and smoke, they would not notice that the ÔlavaÕ pouring down its sides was actually water flowing over internally illuminated red glass panels. [...] If they hankered after the erotic rather than the macabre, they could explore the Temple of Venus [at West Wycombe], ornamented with stone nymphs, satyrs, and monkeys, before passing into the cave below through an entrance fashioned as vagina.
With sidelong tufts of flowÕry fragrance crownÕd,
ÔPlain in its neatnessÕ, spans my garden ground;
What, though two acres thy brief course confine,
Yet sun and shade, and hill and dale are thine,
And use with beauty here more surely found
Than where, to spread the picturesque around,
Cart ruts and quarry holes their charms combine!
Here as thou leadÕst my step through lawn or grove,
Liberal though limited, restrainÕd though free,
Fearless of dew, or dirt, or dust, I rove,
And own those comforts, all derivÕd from thee!
Take then, smooth Path, this tribute of my love,
Thou emblem pure of legal liberty!