Page:The Poetry of Architecture.djvu/111

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THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE.
99

which was more than we could have expected, but a beauty, utterly untransferable from its own settled habitation. In our next paper we shall proceed to the building itself, which will not detain us long, as it is generally simple in its design, and take a general view of villa architecture over Italy.

We have bestowed considerable attention on this style of Garden Architecture, because it has been much abused by persons of high authority, and general good taste, who forgot, in their love of grace and ideal beauty, the connexion with surrounding circumstances so manifest even in its formality. Eustace, we think, is one of these; and although it is an error of a kind he is perpetually committing, he is so far right, that this mannerism is frequently carried into excess even in its own peculiar domain, then becoming disagreeable, and is always a dangerous style in inexperienced hands. We, think, however, paradoxical as the opinion may appear, that every one who is a true lover of Nature, and has been bred in her wild school, will be an admirer of this symmetrical designing, in its place; and will feel, as often as he contemplates it, that the united effect of the wide and noble steps, with the pure water dashing over them like heated crystal, the long shadows of the cypress groves, the golden leaves and glorious light of blossom of the glancing aloes, the pale statues gleaming along the heights in their everlasting death in life, their motionless brows looking down forever on the loveliness in which their beings once dwelt, marble forms of more than mortal grace lightening along