oint out the vicinity of a human abode, furnished
with some elegance. But few people have sufficient taste to discern,
that the art of embellishing consists in interesting, not in astonishing.

Christiania is certainly very pleasantly situated, and the environs I
passed through, during this ride, afforded many fine and cultivated
prospects; but, excepting the first view approaching to it, rarely
present any combination of objects so strikingly new, or picturesque, as
to command remembrance. Adieu!

LETTER XIV.

Christiania is a clean, neat city; but it has none of the graces of
architecture, which ought to keep pace with the refining manners of a
people--or the outside of the house will disgrace the inside, giving the
beholder an idea of overgrown wealth devoid of taste. Large square
wooden houses offend the eye, displaying more than Gothic barbarism. Huge
Gothic piles, indeed, exhibit a characteristic sublimity, and a wildness
of fancy peculiar to the period when they were erected; but size, without
grandeur or elegance, has an emphatical stamp of meanness, of poverty of
conception, which only a commercial spirit could give.

The same thought has struck me, when I have entered the meeting-house of
my respected friend, Dr. Price. I am surprised that the dissenters, who
have not laid aside all the pomps and vanities of life, should imagine a
noble pillar, or arch, unhallowed. Whilst men have senses, whatever
soothes them lends wings to devotion; else why do the beauties of nature,
where all that charm them are spread around with a lavish hand, force
even the sorrowing heart to acknowledge that existence is a blessing? and
this acknowledgment is the most sublime homage we can pay to the Deity.

The argument of convenience is absurd. Who would labour for wealth, if
it were to procure nothing but conveniences. If we wish to render
mankind moral from principle, we must, I am persuaded, give a greater
scope to the enjoyments of the senses by blending taste with them. This
has frequently occurred to me since I have been in the north, and
observed that there sanguine characters always take refuge in drunkenness
after the fire of youth is spent.

But I have flown from Norway. To go back to the wooden houses; farms
constructed with logs, and even little villages, here erected in the same
simple manner, have appeared to me very picturesque. In the more remote
parts I had been particularly pleased with many