ure, he began at the cornice, not
at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the
ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond or
caraway seed in it--though I hold that almonds are most wholesome
without the sugar--and not how the inhabitant, 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 shell-fish 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 than a
tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to
try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy
will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed
to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth
to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within
outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is
the only builder--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,
without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty
of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like
unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this
country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble
log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the
inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their
surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting
will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and
as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after
effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural
ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them
off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can
do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What
if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature,
and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices
as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and
the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, fo