Well do I remember the thrilling and exquisite
moment when first, first in my life (which had not been over long), I
encountered, in a calm and shadowy dingle, darkened with the thick
spreading of tall pines, and voiceful with the singing of a
rock-encumbered stream, and passing up towards the flank of a smooth
green mountain, whose swarded summit shone in the summer snow like an
emerald set in silver; when, I say, I first encountered in this calm
defile of the Jura, the unobtrusive, yet beautiful, front of the Swiss
cottage. I thought it the loveliest piece of architecture I had ever had
the felicity of contemplating; yet it was nothing in itself, nothing but
a few mossy fir trunks, loosely nailed together, with one or two gray
stones on the roof: but its power was the power of association; its
beauty, that of fitness and humility.
39. How different is this from what modern architects erect, when they
attempt to produce what is, by courtesy, called a Swiss cottage. The
modern building known in Britain by that name has very long chimneys,
covered with various exceedingly ingenious devices for the convenient
reception and hospitable entertainment of soot, supposed by the innocent
and deluded proprietor to be "meant for ornament." Its gable roof slopes
at an acute angle, and terminates in an interesting and romantic manner,
at each extremity, in a tooth-pick.
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