I was not less pleased with the higher ornamental architecture,—­the old churches and cathedrals,—­which appealed to me in a way architecture had never before done.  In fact, I found that I had never seen architecture before,—­a building with genius and power in it, and that one could look at with the eye of the imagination.  Not mechanics merely, but poets, had wrought and planned here, and the granite was tender with human qualities.  The plants and weeds growing in the niches and hollows of the walls, the rooks and martins and jackdaws inhabiting the towers and breeding about the eaves, are but types of the feelings and emotions of the human heart that flit and hover over these old piles, and find affectionate lodgment in them.

Time, of course, has done a great deal for this old architecture.  Nature has taken it lovingly to herself, has set her seal upon it, and adopted it into her system.  Just the foil which beauty—­especially the crystallic beauty of architecture—­needs has been given by this hazy, mellowing atmosphere.  As the grace and suggestiveness of all objects are enhanced by a fall of snow,—­forest, fence, hive, shed, knoll, rock, tree, all being laid under the same white enchantment,—­so time has wrought in softening and toning down this old religious architecture, and bringing it into harmony with nature.

Our climate has a much keener edge, both of frost and fire, and touches nothing so gently or creatively; yet time would, no doubt, do much for our architecture, if we would give it a chance,—­for that apotheosis of prose, the National Capitol at Washington, upon which, I notice, a returned traveler bases our claim to be considered “ahead” of the Old World, even in architecture; but the reigning gods interfere, and each spring or fall give the building a clean shirt in the shape of a coat of white paint.  In like manner, other public buildings never become acclimated, but are. annually scoured with soap and sand, the national passion for the brightness of newness interfering to defeat any benison which the gods might be disposed to pronounce upon them.  Spotlessness, I know, is not a characteristic of our politics, though it is said that whitewashing is, which may account for this ceaseless paint-pot renovation of our public buildings.  In a world lit only by the moon, our Capitol would be a paragon of beauty, and the spring whitewashing could also be endured; but under our blazing sun and merciless sky it parches the vision, and makes it turn with a feeling of relief to rocks and trees, or to some weather-stained, dilapidated shed or hovel.

How winningly and picturesquely in comparison the old architecture of London addresses itself to the eye,—­St. Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, with its vast blotches and stains, as if it had been dipped in some black Lethe of oblivion, and then left to be restored by the rains and the elements!  This black Lethe is the London smoke and fog, which has left a dark deposit over all the building, except