est crowd in it but an unobtrusive
detail, its air of spontaneity and inevitableness which suggested
nature itself, rather than art? No other scene of man's creation
seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honour. Venice, Naples, Rome,
Florence, Edinburgh, Athens, Constantinople, each in its way is lovely
indeed; but in each view of each of these there is some jarring
feature, something that we have to _ignore_ in order to thoroughly
lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene. The Court of Honour was
practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully
and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting
or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense
of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.
The glamour of old association that illumines Athens or Venice was in
a way compensated by our deep impression of the pathetic
transitoriness of the dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation
it afforded of the soul of a great nation. For it will to all time
remain impossibly ridiculous to speak of a country or a city as wholly
given over to the worship of Mammon which almost involuntarily gave
birth to this ethereal emanation of pure and uneconomic beauty.

Undoubtedly there are few things more dismal than the sunless canons
which in Chicago are called streets; and the luckless being who is
concerned there with retail trade is condemned to pass the greater
part of his life in unrelieved ugliness. Things, however, are rather
better in the "office" quarter; and he who is ready to admit that
exigency of site gives some excuse for "elevator architecture" will
find a good deal to interest him in its practice at Chicago. Indeed,
no one can fail to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural
engineering which can run up a building of twenty stories, the walls
of which are merely a veneer or curtain. Few will cavil at the
handsome and comfortable equipment of the best interiors; but, given
the necessity of their existence, the wide-minded lover of art will
find something to reward his attention even in their exteriors. In
many instances their architects have succeeded admirably in steering a
middle course between the ornate style of a palace on the one hand
and the packing case with windows on the other; and the observer might
unreservedly admire the general effect were it not for the crick in
his neck that reminds him most forcibly that he c