In a biographical note upon the latter, the Congressional Directory states that the house is “kept open to the public all the year.”  My companion and I were admitted to the grounds, but were informed that, though the building was unoccupied, no one was permitted to enter.  While we were in the vicinity of the house we were attended by one of the men employed on the place, who told us that when people were allowed to roam about at will, there had been much vandalism; ivy had been pulled from the walls, shrubbery broken, pieces of brick chipped out of the steps, and teeth knocked from the heads of the marble lions which flank them.

Of recent years there has been on foot a movement, launched, I believe, by Mrs. Martin W. Littleton, of New York, to influence the Government to purchase Monticello from its present owner.  It is difficult to see precisely how Mr. Levy could be forced to part with his property, if he did not wish to.  Nevertheless public sentiment on this subject has become so strong that he has agreed to let the Government have Monticello “at a price”—­so, at least, I was informed in Charlottesville.

CHAPTER XV

THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

     The opening of the University of Virginia was an event of prime
     importance for the higher education in the whole country, and
     really marks a new era.

     —­CHARLES FORSTER SMITH.

Like Monticello, the buildings of the University of Virginia are those of an intellectual, a classicist, a purist, and, like it, they might have been austere but for the warmth of their red brick and the glow of their white-columned porticos.  But they are cheerful buildings, which, individually and as a group, attain a geometrical yet soft perfection, a supreme harmony of form and color.

The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the Pantheon at Rome.  From the rotunda, at either side, starts a white-columned arcade connecting the various houses which are distributed at graceful intervals along the margins of the rectangular lawn, above which loom the tops of even rows of beautiful old trees.  Flanking the buildings of the lawn, and reached by brick walks which pass between the famous serpentine walls (walls but one brick thick which support themselves on the snake-fence principle, by progressing in a series of reverse curves), are the “ranges”:  solid rows of one-story student dormitories built of brick and fronted by colonnades which command other lawns and other trees.

With a single exception, restorations and additions to the university have been made with reverence and taste, and the Brooks Museum, the one architectural horror of the place, fortunately does not stand upon the lawn.  Since it is said that beauty could not exist were there not ugliness for contrast, this building may have its uses; certainly, after a glance at it, one looks back with renewed delight at the structures of the central group.