And when the
houses are grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic
fellowship as to subject their architecture to a common law, and so
much civic pride as to desire that the whole gathered group of human
dwellings should be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face
of the earth. Not many weeks ago an English clergyman,[198] a master of
this University, a man not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and
great practical sense, told me, by accident, and wholly without
reference to the subject now before us, that he never could enter
London from his country parsonage but with closed eyes, lest the sight
of the blocks of houses which the railroad intersected in the suburbs
should unfit him, by the horror of it, for his day's work.
Now, it is not possible--and I repeat to you, only in more deliberate
assertion, what I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last chapter
of the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_--it is not possible to have any
right morality, happiness, or art, in any country where the cities are
thus built, or thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated; spots
of a dreadful mildew, spreading by patches and blotches over the
country they consume. You must have lovely cities, crystallized, not
coagulated, into form; limited in size, and not casting out the scum
and scurf of them into an encircling eruption of shame, but girded
each with its sacred pomoerium, and with garlands of gardens full of
blossoming trees and softly guided streams.
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