ARCHITECTURE. 
51 
with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we 
forever resign the pleasure of construction to the car¬ 
penter? What does architecture amount to in the 
experience of the mass of men? I never in all my 
walks came across a man engaged in so simple and 
natural an occupation as building his house. We belong 
to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the 
ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and 
the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division 
of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve ? 
No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not 
therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion 
of my thinking for myself. 
True, there are architects so called in this country, 
and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea 
of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, 
a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revela¬ 
tion to him. All very well perhaps from his point of 
view, but only a little better than the common dilettan¬ 
tism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he be¬ 
gan at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only 
how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that 
every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or car¬ 
away seed in it,—though I hold that almonds are most 
wholesome without the sugar,—and not how the inhabit¬ 
ant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, 
and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What 
reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were 
something outward and in the skin merely, — that the 
tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother- 
o’-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of 
Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no 
more to do with the style of architecture of his house 
