Consequently, as it is only by their natural influence that
flowers can address the mind through the eye, we must read Shelley, to
learn how to use flowers, and Shakspeare, to learn to love them. In both
writers we find the wild flower possessing soul as well as life, and
mingling its influence most intimately, like an untaught melody, with
the deepest and most secret streams of human emotion.]
212. Perhaps we should apologize for introducing this in the
_Architectural Magazine_; but it is not out of place: the garden is
almost a necessary adjunct of the Elizabethan villa, and all garden
architecture is utterly useless unless it be assisted by the botanical
effect.
These, then, are a few of the more important principles of architecture,
which are to be kept in view in the blue and in the green country. The
wild, or gray, country is never selected, in Britain, as the site of a
villa; and, therefore, it only remains for us to offer a few remarks on
a subject as difficult as it is interesting and important, the
architecture of the villa in British hill, or brown, country.
VII.
THE BRITISH VILLA.--PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION.
_D. Hill, or Brown Country._
"Vivite contenti casulis et collibus istis."--Juvenal [xiv. 179.]
213. In the Boulevard des Italiens, just at the turning into the Rue de
la Paix (in Paris), there stand a few dusky and withered trees, beside a
kind of dry ditch, paved at the bottom, into which a carriage can with
some difficulty descend, and which affords access (not in an unusual
manner) to the ground floor of a large and dreary-looking house, whose
passages are dark and confined, whose rooms are limited in size, and
whose windows command an interesting view of the dusky trees before
mentioned.
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