is to be the soul of our art: what sort
of a body it is to put on, we shall presently see. Even now it is safe
to assume that no more such granite prisons as the 'Revere' or the
'Astor' will be built for hotels. Lightness, variety, and vivacity will
more probably characterize this style.

The _shop front_ is something that we must have in some shape or other,
and, if fairly treated, it would become as decidedly American as
business is. It is susceptible of great variety, but care must be taken
that it harmonizes with the superstructure. How often we see massive
structures of marble, five stories or more, supported on basements of
plate glass, apparently; while the real supports are carefully
concealed! The best method, so far tried, seems to be that in which the
columns are made sufficiently prominent to show their object, and are
surmounted by arches, which give a good basis for what comes next
above, while affording sufficient window space to the store front.

But we must make up our mind to part with those hideous signboards,
which trail their loathsome length across our best buildings, regardless
of console or capital or cornice. For the importance of the sign renders
it constructive, and it has as much right to take part in the design as
a door or a window. Instead of being pinned on like an afterthought, it
should be built into the wall, panel fashion, and by a little taste in
the selection of the style of letter, it might become one of the most
striking features of the whole front. Color would be better for the
letters than relief, being more economical and more easily altered.

Our warehouses and even our factories might become imposing objects if
appropriately conceived, for is not labor ennobling? Anything that is
worth doing, is worth doing well; and if any of our manufacturing towns
are hideous, they are not necessarily so.[24] There is a certain
grandeur about many such places, with their myriad chimneys and
ponderous wheels and whirling engines, that deserves a corresponding
grandeur of expression, and some of our Pennsylvania ironworks already
afford splendid examples of this. We have seldom been more impressed by
the grandeur of mechanical operations than on a recent night visit to
one of the large rolling mills of Scranton. The whole interior, vast as
a cathedral, was brilliantly lighted by the numerous operations in
molten and red-hot iron that were everywhere in progress, and, with its
gleaming fur