Emerson on landscape

"The charming landscape I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of all these men's farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title."

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature, 1836, quoted in Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews, Oxford University Press, 1999, page 158.