If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite—untutored romanticism. Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion a “characteristic type of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory, beautiful, strange thing.... An Italian villa in stone, massive, noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual in its combinations.... There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in.... Yet, although the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is an English home in its substantiality, its home-like and comfortable aspects.”
It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the Present and Future Prospects of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description:
“I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes—
‘Roved for fruit,
Roved far, and gathered much....’
“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that—
‘To his promise just
Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’