* 



AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



and atmosphere, how it all contrasts, for instance, with 

 the showy, gilded, cast-iron interior of our commercial 

 or political palaces, where everything that smacks of 

 life or nature is studiously excluded 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 breed- 

 ing 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 herself, 

 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 sug- 

 gestiveness of all objects are enhanced by a fall of 

 snow, — forest, fence, hive, shed, knoll, rock, tree, all 

 being laid under the same white enchantment, — so 

 time has wrought in softening and toning down this old 



