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and perfect order that befit a stage set for a play. The lawns, walks, benches, ballrooms, porches, and piazzas provided additional settings for social interactions among visitors. ‘‘The green during the day,’’ one visitor noted at White Sulphur, was ‘‘alive with children & men, the grave & gay, old & young, all seeking their pleasure.’’ The benches around the trees and upon the main greenswards offered space for loungers. The walks and verandas provided ‘‘promenade[s] for those who prefer[red] motion’’ and were ‘‘enlivened by gaily dressed belles and beaux.’’ A resort’s green was one of the premier spots, along with the ballroom, where the visitors not only played but also performed, presenting and judging fashions, manners, and conversations. Each lady or gentleman provided spectacle and animated the landscape—a necessary part of a ‘‘smooth and brilliant’’ or refined arena. Without the appropriate architectural and landscape settings at the springs resorts, no spectacle could have been achieved; refinement would have found no place.32  ‘‘A Country More Wildly Picturesque’’ The settings of the Virginia Springs juxtaposed controlled landscapes with uncontrolled nature. Wild disorder surrounded tamed order. Rows of rugged mountains, multitudes of cascading streams, and expanses of deep forests formed the resorts’ perimeters and contrasted sharply with the refined and well-tended grounds and buildings within their confines. The few valley farms provided pastoral interludes amid the Blue Ridge Mountains.Visitors appreciated and enjoyed the natural landscape of mountains and forests as much as the designed landscape of buildings and greenswards. From his cottage porch at White Sulphur, Samuel Hoffman could gaze upon ‘‘a beautiful view of the valley and the Mountains, and all that is going on, on the lawn—a prettier spot I scarcely know.’’ Golden meadows, small wooded groves, and tree-dotted lawns skirted the edges of the resort, mediating between the carefully landscaped grounds of White SulphurSprings and the wild landscape of mountains and forests beyond (fig. 5). Visitors rarely failed to comment upon the sharp contrast between the manicured greens of the resorts and the wild nature surrounding them. In Society in America (1837), Harriet Martineau observed that White Sulphur ‘‘pre31 t h e s c e n e sent[ed] such beauties to the eye, as perhaps few watering-places in the world can boast.’’ ‘‘All is wild, beyond the precincts of the establishment,’’ she noted, hoping it would always remain so. Viewing the scenery around them, moreover, provided elite visitors a chance to utilize their knowledge of fashionable aesthetic theories and language, further displaying their education and refinement.1 Experiences with and observations of nature became central topics of the guests’ conversation at the spas. Descriptions of the natural scenery and of the feelings it inspired filled visitors’ journals and letters throughout the period. In these descriptions, many revealed their familiarity with the fashionable language of viewing nature that derived from eighteenth-century British aesthetic theories of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. By the mid-eighteenth century in England and on the Continent, learned and artistic men and women reveled in nature’s glorious wildness. Unlike their Enlightenment predecessors, who sought signs of reason in nature, these men and women looked to nature to produce an emotional impact. At the end of the eighteenth century, elite Americans adopted this appreciation of nature and borrowed the British aesthetic language for viewing it; they continued to use the language throughout the nineteenth century. Their vocabulary and attitudes derived from such eighteenth-century British and European philosophers and authors as Alexander Pope, Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, and Uvedale Price.2 As they did with architectural and landscape styles and other current fashions, elite southerners, hoping to display their gentility, borrowed English intellectual models and then adapted them to their own regional environment. Southerners and other Americans did not accept British eighteenth-century aesthetic theories in their entirety. In particular, Americans did not consider the sublime as terrifying as Burke had; instead, they found the awe-inspiring sublime delightful and developed their own definitions of the concept. After seeing ‘‘the purple peaks . . . of a vast mountain chain,’’ Mary J. Windle gasped ‘‘in an ecstasy of enjoyment’’ at ‘‘one of the most sublime views.’’ At the same time, they increasingly used ‘‘beautiful’’ for any scene that the viewer considered pleasing or pretty, not merely for ‘‘smooth and polished’’ or ‘‘light and delicate’’ objects. Finally, by the mid1800s , the picturesque was simplified to apply to any ‘‘striking, irregular, spirited forms’’ or even to any scene that resembled a landscape painting or...

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