HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON. 541 



Ills work at the State Capitol at Albany. These buildings, and others 

 which belong to the same period, mark the ripening of his powers, and 

 the development of that strong and masculine style which afterwards 

 was seen in all he built, and which must always make his work recog- 

 nizable and notable for the best qualities of architecture- 

 Then came ten years of the most brilliant and exuberant vitality. 

 The place which the successful architect, still a young man, had won 

 at the head of his profession, was recognized with singular cordiality 

 on every side. Students flocked to him for instruction, and his studio 

 at Brookline, where he established his home in 1875, became famous 

 for the inspiration with which he filled it. He was sought out by 

 men from all over the country who wanted greatness and simplicity 

 and strength in any of the fields of architecture in which he had 

 shown his power. These fields were very various. Churches like 

 those in Boston, and like the great cathedral which he designed, but 

 never built, in Albany ; great civic buildings, like those in Albany 

 and Cincinnati, and his last great work, which he left unfinished in 

 Pittsburg ; memorial halls and libraries, for which he created a 

 type of singular beauty and fitness in North Easton, and Quincy, and 

 Maiden, and Burlington ; Academic structures, like Sever and Austin 

 Halls at Cambridge ; railroad stations, which surprise the traveller 

 with the possibility of what before seemed hopeless ; great mercantile 

 houses in Boston, and Hartford, and Chicago ; dwellings in Wash- 

 ington, and Boston, and on the sea-shore, and in the country ; — these 

 all came in profusion from his brain, which stamped each of them with 

 separate originality and yet gave them all the indubitable mark of his 

 personal character and genius. 



To those who knew him well, all the work that he did must seem 

 to have essential relations to the sort of man he was. The style was 

 the man. A solidity and seriousness which yet was always full of vital- 

 ity and never dull, a love of simplicity which was not an abandonment 

 of richness but a delighted discovery of it in the simplest things, a 

 constant desire to produce impression by great forms and masses and 

 not by pettiness of detail, spontaneity and freshness which were all tlie 

 more impressive because they carried in themselves the principle of 

 self-restraint, — all these appear in the freely treated Romanesque in 

 which his monumental buildings are constructed, and something cor- 

 responding to them is felt, by those who knew him, iu all the charac- 

 ter and conduct of the man, 



His influence upon the architecture of America must be very strong, 

 and cannot be anything but good. He broke the spell which still 



