65 



it is playful, elegant, graceful and not thin. Balanced, 

 it touches with sweetness and rhyme the prose of other 

 orders. They seem cold beside it. Surely no other fa- 

 cades crowding a city ever held one as Venice does. 

 One wanders in it as in an enchanthig place, lifting itself 

 above the water, as it does, where everything enriches by 

 contrast, as if it had been created above the sea by the 

 curve and impnlse of its wave, restrained and fixed in laws 

 of beauty as nature herself works. We are never tired 

 there of the order. It is too beautiful to satiate, and it 

 is elegantly distributed and changed. Infallible laws 

 governed Gothic, as they did Greek, and both partook of 

 nature at the sonrce, each in its own kind. Every time one 

 passes a Venetian front here, one is stirred, a strain comes 

 over one, and the eye kindles, and the feeling is touched. 

 This is the case when we come upon that angle by the 

 common where the group of the Boylston house and the next 

 building stands, and compare it with all other styles; or 

 simply view a touch of the incomparable arch and group- 

 ing wherever it is applied, and used tolerably. Like Ve- 

 netian painting, it was the sole creation of Venice, and it 

 has never been surpassed. The wondrous city created 

 two things, its architecture and its painting, and it left 

 literature aside. It was like a radiant bridsre from an- 

 tiquity to the present time, impinging on the East. The 

 works of Mr. Cummings, adapted here, not always equal, 

 have planted this noljle style, and they are the most im- 

 posing civic things in the cit}^ it seems to me. 



Of Interiors : — They are ingenious and overcharged, 

 as in literature Tennyson is oversweet. Browning over- 

 rough, Emerson overpithy. The great style has repose. 

 Le dcfaut de ses qucdites, as the French say. We are suf- 

 focated with bric-a-brac, tortured into picturesqueness. 

 Gothic has been let loose in the house. We sigh for the 



ESSEX INST. BULLETIN. XII 5 



