THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE.
| ANALYSIS. | ||
| Moresque Spain | 10 | per cent. |
| Moresque Algiers | 10 | “ |
| Moresque California Mission | 10 | “ |
| East Indian | 5 | “ |
| Newly reclaimed land | 10 | “ |
| Chinese ornament | 5 | “ |
| Modern invention, pure | 50 | “ |
| Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere | 00 | “ |
EASTOVER TERRACE AND PERISTYLE.
For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented architecture is respectfully submitted ([Plate VIII]), and a very clever sample it is. The inventors of the style themselves could have done no better; only the irresistible melancholy in the rhyming of Poe’s poem is not easily put out of the head, especially when, as in this case, it happens to be extremely appropriate. So let us continue:
“And we passed to the end of a vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb.”
Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one’s mind naturally reverts to his childhood (you must have had a childhood)—reverts to the wondrous houses we visited in the impressionable days of long ago. Ah, they were a very different kind of houses, were they not?—houses with significance, houses with personality, if building material may ever be said to incorporate that. They had a history to tell. They had legends, too. As we think of them they seem to have been literally covered with legends, some of them cut with the jack-knife deep in the attic timbers. But they were all legends that appeal to happiness. They were not the legends of tombs. And the old sensations come back to us again. Perhaps it is just as the afternoon light begins to fail so that we can no longer read, and the sunset is very beautiful.
No, no, the vagaries of geometrical invention will never supplant those first loves!