Were welcome to me; soon and simply pleased, I loved her rudest scenes-warrens,2 and heaths, And the dew fills the silver bindweed's cups: 3. I loved to trace the brooks whose humid banks Who from the tumps,3 with bright green mosses clad, Heart-shaped, and triply-folded, and its root Creeping like beaded coral; or who there Gathers, the copse's pride, anemones,* With rays like golden studs on ivory laid CHARLOTTE SMITH 1 FREAK'ED, variegated. [for rabbits, etc. 3 TIMP, a little hillock. 2 WAR'-REN (wor'-ren), an inclosed place 4 A-NEM'-O-NE, the wind flower. 1. IF all persons building in the country knew how much the pleasure we derive from rural architecture is enhanced by truthfulness, we should be spared the pain of seeing so many miserable failures in country houses of small dimensions. A cottage-by which we mean a house of small size-will never succeed in an attempt to impose itself upon us as a villa. Nay, by any such attempt on the part of the builder, the cot-tage will lose its own peculiar charm, which is as great, in its way, as that of the villa.1 2. This throwing away the peculiar beauty and simplicity of a cottage, in endeavoring to imitate the richness and variety of a villa, is as false in taste as for a person of simple character to lay aside his simplicity and frankness, to assume the cultivation and polish of a man of the world. The basis for enduring beauty is truthfulness, no less in houses than in morals; and cottages, farm-houses, and villas, which aim to be only the best and most agreeable cottages, farm-houses, and villas, will be infinitely more acceptable to the senses, feelings, and understanding than those which endeavor to assume a grandeur foreign to their nature and purpose. 3. The principle which the reason would lay down for the government of the architect in constructing buildings for domestic as well as public life, is the simple and obvious one, that both in material and character they should appear to be what they are. To build a house of wood so exactly in imitation of stone as to lead the spectator to suppose it stone, is a paltry artifice, at variance with all truthfulness. When we employ stone as a building material, let it be clearly expressed; when we employ wood, there should be no less frankness in avowing the material. There is more merit in so using wood as to give to it the utmost expression of which the substance is capable, than in endeavoring to make it look like some other material. 4. A glaring want of truthfulness is sometimes seen in the attempt of ignorant builders to express a style of architecture which demands massiveness, weight, and solidity, in a material that possesses none of these qualities. Such is the imitation of Gothic castles, with towers and battlements built of wood. Nothing can well be more paltry and contemptible. The sugar castles of confectioners and pastry-cooks are far more admirable as works of art. If a man is ambitious of attracting attention by his house, and can only afford wood, let him, if he can content himself with nothing appropriate, build a gigantic wigwam of logs and bark, or even a shingle palace, but not attempt mock battlements of pine boards, and strong towers of thin plank. The imposition attempted is more than even the most uneducated person of native sense can possibly bear. 1 VIL ́-LA, an elegant country seat, or farm, with a mansion and out-houses. LESSON XI.-BURIAL OF THE DEAD-MONUMENTS OF THE BURIAL-GROUND. J. A. PICTON. 1. VARIOUS modes have prevailed, in different ages and countries, for the disposal of the remains of the dead, according to the different ideas entertained of the relation between the soul and the body, and the peculiar notions of a future state of existence. Among the Greeks, the custom of burning the dead was nearly, if not quite, universal. The ashes were collected with pious care into an urn, which was deposited in a tomb, sometimes a family vault, with a monument erected over it to the memory of the deceased. Every classical reader will remember the description of the funeral pile of Patroclus, in the twenty-third book of the Iliad: And well-fed sheep and sable oxen slay: And the piled victims round the body spread." 3. Whatever may be our views of death and a future state, our feelings and sensations on the subject are influenced to a very considerable extent by association; and, unfortunately, the associations which we connect with the final resting-place of the departed have too generally been of the most gloomy, and sometimes of the most terrific description: 4. "The grave! dread thing, Men shiver when thou'rt named: Nature, appall'd, The long extended realms and rueful wastes, By glimmering through thy low-brow'd murky vaults, Lets fall a supernumerary horror, And only serves to make thy night more irksome." 5. But are these the feelings with which we should look upon the grave? To use the words of an elegant modern writer -Washington Irving-"Why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors around the tomb of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by every thing that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead, or that might win the living to virtue. It is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation." 6. Death and the grave are solemn and awful realities; they speak with a powerful and intelligible voice to the heart of every spectator, as being the common lot of all, the gate of access to another state of existence through which all must pass. Our cemeteries, then, should bear a solemn and soothing character; they should have nothing in them savoring of fashionable prettiness, nor any far-fetched conceits or tortured allegories; they should be equally remote, in expression, from fanatical gloom and conceited affectation. 7. There are many of our country church-yards, seated deep in the recesses of venerable woods, and shut out, as it were, from the every-day world, which might furnish us models for imitation, as far as calm serenity and quiet beauty go; where the "rugged elms" and "yew-tree's shade," coupled with the "ivy-mantled tower," with which they are connected, give an air of time-honored sanctity to the scene; where no sound reaches the ear but the low murmur of the wind through the summer leaves, or the sighing of the storm through the wintry branches, realizing, if any situation could do so, the description of the poet: "There is a calm for those that weep, A rest for weary pilgrims found; 8. Of the architectural adaptation of monumental structures to the solemnities and consolations of Christian burial, a writer in the North American Review makes the following excellent observations: "There is certainly no place, not even the church itself, where it is more desirable that our religion should be present to the mind than the cemetery, which must be regarded either as the end of all things, the last, melancholy, hopeless resort of perishing humanity, the sad and fearful portion of man, which is to involve body and soul alike in endless night; or, on the other hand, as the gateway of a glorious immortality, the passage to a brighter world, whose splendors beam even upon the dark chambers of the tomb. 9. "It is from the very brink of the grave, where rest in eternal sleep the mortal remains of those whom we have best loved, that Christianity speaks to us in its most triumphant soul-exulting words of victory over death, and of a life to come. Surely, then, all that man places over the tomb should, in a measure, speak the same language. The monuments of the burialground should remind us that this is not our final abode; they should, as far as possible, recall to us the consolations and promises of our religion. 10. But there is a style of architecture which belongs peculiarly to Christianity, and owes its existence even to this religion; whose very ornaments remind one of the joys of a life beyond the grave; whose lofty vaults and arches are crowded with the forms of prophets, and martyrs, and beatified spirits, and seem to resound with the choral hymns of angels and archangels. But peculiarly are its power and sublimity displayed in the monuments it rears over the tomb. The elevated form on which reposes the statue of the mailed knight, or the holy woman, composed into the stately rest of the grave, yet the hands folded over the breast, as if commending the spirit to God who gave it; the canopy which overhangs it; the solemn vault which rises above; the gorgeous windows, through which is poured a flood of golden light upon the abode of the dead-these are the characteristics of the architecture of Christianity, the sublime, the glorious Gothic." LESSON XII.-THE ARCHITECTURE OF NATURE. Within the sunlit forest, Our roof the bright blue sky, Where fountains flow, and wild flowers blow, We lift our hearts on high.-ELLIOTT. 1. HAVING dwelt at some length on the fading monuments of man's power, pride, ambition, and glory, and of his daily life, his religious faith, and his burial, it may be well, in closing, to direct our thoughts, in reverent contemplation, to that higher order of architecture every where seen in Nature's works, and full of expression of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Architect. 2. We might speak of the mountains which He has set up |
