22 
House & Garden 
B ut for the richly broidered vestments that clothed him and 
the biretta stuck aslant, one eye, you would have taken him 
for a farmer from thereabouts. He was old and gnarled, and the 
censer in his hand trembled. Beside him at the entrance to the 
house stood the lad of the family, carrying the holy water. Behind 
were the other members of the family—the mother and father and 
the daughters—the farm hands and their wives, a few neighbors 
and some friends who had come down from the city for the 
occasion. . . . 
The whispers died down. The old priest muttered something 
—his voice was too weak to carry to the outer fringe of the group. 
Then came the sharp sound of chains clinking and a cloud of in¬ 
cense floated up against the door. 
The house blessing had commenced. 
When the lintel had been made sacred for those who were to 
pass beneath it, we trailed behind him—-through the living-room 
and the library, into the dining-room and even down to the spotless 
kitchen; then up the stairs to the bedrooms and boudoirs above. 
In its turn each room was remembered, each room censed and 
dedicated for those who were to live in it. 
This is not the recollection of some mediceval ceremony; it 
happened just the other day in a country house on the Hudson. 
Nor were the owners folk of archaic habits or especially religious 
turn of mind. They were modern people, who read Shaw and 
Freud and enjoyed the Ballet Russe and tangoed and wore up- 
to-date clothes and patronized Fifth Avenue shops. They had just 
finished building and furnishing this new house, and it occurred 
to them that a good way to start making it a home was by having 
it blessed. So they called in the priest from the local parish and 
assembled their friends and the man of the house stayed away 
from the office for the day—and together they saw the house 
dedicated to being a home. . . . And when the ceremony was over 
and luncheon had been served, the guests rode away in motor cars 
and the family turned indoors to hear 
Caruso sing from the Victrola. 
W HILE it is presumptuous to 
write a footnote to a poem, the 
verses on this page were so pro¬ 
vocative that I could not refrain 
from devoting the remaining space to 
comment on house blessings and all 
those things on the other side of the 
house that would seem to be utterly 
neglected by us in these days. 
Europe, wracked with war, has 
been driven to its knees, to a con¬ 
sideration of things on the other side 
of materialism. America, rich with 
gold, has become too fat to bend its 
knees, too stodgy to look beyond the 
surface. War is a heavy price to 
pay, but it were better for a people 
to lose its whole country than to 
lose its national soul. Now the 
soul of a people is found in its homes. 
There it is born. There it is bred. 
There are cherished those ideals that 
make a nation strong and lasting. 
And a nation is sound only to that 
degree to which its home life is sound. 
Because of our accumulated 
wealth, house building has enor¬ 
mously increased. More houses are 
being built today than five years ago, 
for the simple reason that more 
people can afford to build them. But 
it is a debatable point if Americans 
are creating more homes, if the tissue 
of the national soul is being: strength- 
O o 
ened, if our people are caring for those things on the other side 
of the house. 
The ceremony described above was so unusual as to deserve 
describing. It is the sort of thing people talk about for days. 
Yet the spirit of what it stands for should be anything but unusual. 
I do not necessarily mean that men should dedicate their houses 
with religious observances, but that they should have the sort of 
ideals which caused those observances to come to pass. 
Many of us build houses; few of us build homes. We lay 
granite foundations and rear sturdy roof beams. We do, yes 
we do build good houses in America—houses good to look at and 
good to live in. But there development would seem to stop. And 
(if you do not mind my continuing to think out loud) I believe 
that part of the trouble lies in our neglecting to dedicate our houses 
to a life as strong as those granite foundations and ideals as lofty 
as the roof beams. 
♦ 
A MAN should be hero to the house in which he lives. 
Once on a time it was the king who lived in the palace and 
the serf who dwelt in the cot; now serfs live in palaces and you 
find the kings quite content with the grandeur of their simple ■ 
homes. Have you noticed this—men and women whose houses 
dwarfed them, shamed them into nonentities? I wonder why? ■ 
Perhaps the reasons can be found back in the original purpose * 
of the house blessing. 
In old times the ceremony of house blessing had two aspects. 
It was designed to cast out evil spirits—the heathen fays of the 
wood and the gnomes of the stone that men once worshipped; 
and to dedicate the cleansed building to new purposes. 
In these days the fays of the timber from the forest and the 
gnomes of the stone from the rock-ribbed hills are giants compared 
with the men and women whose 
houses they labor to build. The very 
window panes are clearer than the 
eyes of these men and women, and 
the echo of the walls heartier than 
their laughter. Were the priest to 
cast out the evil spirits of modern 
houses, he would doubtless extirpate 
the very folk who live in them and 
commend to life everlasting the spir¬ 
its of wood and stone! 
♦ 
E must cleanse before we can 
dedicate. We must build before 
we can bless. We must rear lives 
nobler than the houses they will pro¬ 
tect. Let us remember these things. 
It is more important to have your 
head in the heavens than to have your 
roof there. It is more important that 
your heart be warm than your hearth, 
and that your spiritual horizons be 
wider than those you see from your 
windows. 
Because to every house that is built 
with hands is another built with 
hands unseen. And it is the house 
built with unseen hands in which we 
actually live. The rest is just so 
much wood and stone and steel. 
Most people are like a Russian toy— 
like a doll within a doll. Some are 
bigger than their houses because they 
are as big as their homes. The home 
must always be larger than the house. 
These are quixotic words, mes 
frh-es, but they are part of the in¬ 
sanity that keeps men sane. 
Bless the Four Corners of this House, 
And be the Lintel blest; 
And bless the Hearth, and bless the Board, 
And bless each Place of Rest; 
And bless the Door that opens wide 
To Stranger as to Kin; 
And bless each crystal Windowpane 
That lets the Starlight in; 
And bless the Rooftree overhead, 
And every sturdy Wall; 
The Peace of Man, the Peace of God, 
The Peace of Love on All! 
