And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring
up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our
capital--upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered
wood and imitated stone--upon those gloomy rows of formalized
minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as
solitary as similar--not merely with the careless disgust of an
offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but
with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must
be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native
ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs
of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark
the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere
than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn;
when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and
live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the
comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and
the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ
only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy
openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of
earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of
stability without the luxury of change.
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