266 RURAL ARCHITECTURE. 



eign lands delight to contribute, must be cherished by every Ameri- 

 can as the key-stone of his liberty ; it must be rendered still firmer 

 and broader, to meet the growing strength and the growing dangers 

 of the country ; it must be adapted to the character of our people, 

 different and distinct as we believe that character to be from that 

 of all other nations ; and, above all, without teaching creeds or doc- 

 trines, it must be pervaded by profound and genuine moral feeling, 

 more central, and more vital, than that of any narrow sectarianism. 



Well, will any of our readers believe that this train of thought 

 has grown out of our having just seen a most shabby and forbid- 

 ding-looking school-house ! Truly, yes ! and, as in an old picture 

 of Rembrandt's, the stronger the lights, the darker also the shadows, 

 we are obliged to confess that, with so much to be proud of in our 

 system of common schools, there is nothing so beggarly and dis- 

 graceful as the externals of our country school-houses themselves. 



A traveller through the Union, is at once struck with the gen- 

 eral appearance of comfort in the houses of our rural population. 

 But, by the way-side, here and there, he observes a small, one story* 

 edifice, built of wood or stone in the most meagre mode, dingy in 

 aspect, and dilapidated in condition. It is placed in the barest 

 and most forbidding site in the whole country round. If you fail 

 to recognize it by these marks, you can easily make it out by the 

 broken fences, and tumble-down stone walls that surround it ; by 

 the absence of all trees, and by the general expression of melan- 

 choly, as if every lover of good order and beauty in the neighbor- 

 hood had abandoned it to the genius of desolation. 



This condition of things is almost universal. It must, therefore, 

 be founded in some deep-rooted prejudices, % or some mistaken idea 

 of the importance of the subject. 



That the wretched condition of the country school-houses is ow- 

 ing to a general license of what the phrenologists would call the 

 organs of destructiveness in boys, we are well aware. But it is in 

 giving this license that the great error of teachers and superintend- 

 ents of schools lies. There is also, God be thanked, a principle of 

 order and a love of beauty implanted in every human mind ; and 

 the degree to which it may be cultivated in children is quite un- 

 known to those who start leaving such a principle wholly out of 



