MELLOW ENGLAND. 176 



instance, with the showy, gilded, cast-iron interior of 

 our commercial or political palaces, where every 

 thing that smacks of life or nature is studiously ex- 

 cluded under the necessity of making the building 

 fire-proof. 



I was not less pleased with the higher ornamental 

 architecture, the old churches and cathedrals, 

 which appealed to me in a way architecture had never 

 before done. In fact, I found that I had never seen 

 architecture before a building with genius and 

 power in it, and that one could look at with the 

 eye of the imagination. Not mechanics merely, but 

 poets had wrought and planned here, and the granite 

 was tender with human qualities. The plants and 

 weeds growing in the niches and hollows of the walls ; 

 the rooks and martins and jackdaws inhabiting the 

 towers and breeding about the eaves, are but types of 

 the feelings and emotions of the human heart that flit 

 and hover over these old piles, and find affectionate 

 lodgment in them. 



Time, of course, has done a great deal for this old 

 architecture. Nature has taken it lovingly to her- 

 self, has set her seal upon it, and adopted it into her 

 system. Just the foil which beauty, especially the 

 crystallic beauty of architecture, needs, has been 

 given by this hazy, mellowing atmosphere. As the 

 grace and suggestiveness of all objects are enhanced 

 by a fall of snow, forest, fence, hive, shed, knoll, 

 rock, tree, all being laid under the same white en- 

 chantment, so time has wrought in softening and 



