227. For, first, the only prospect which is really desirable or
delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room. This is
rather a bold position, but it will appear evident on a little
consideration. It is pleasant enough to have a pretty little bit visible
from the bedrooms; but, after all, it only makes gentlemen cut
themselves in shaving, and ladies never think of anything beneath the
sun when they are dressing. Then, in the dining-room, windows are
absolutely useless, because dinner is always uncomfortable by daylight,
and the weight of furniture effect which adapts the room for the
gastronomic rites, renders it detestable as a sitting-room. In the
library, people should have something else to do, than looking out of
the windows; in the drawing-room, the uncomfortable stillness of the
quarter of an hour before dinner, may, indeed, be alleviated by having
something to converse about at the windows: but it is very shameful to
spoil a prospect of any kind, by looking at it when we are not ourselves
in a state of corporal comfort and mental good-humor, which nobody can
be after the labor of the day, and before he has been fed. But the
breakfast-room, where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first
breath of the morning air, the first glance of gentle eyes; to which we
descend in the very spring and elasticity of mental renovation and
bodily energy, in the gathering up of our spirit for the new day, in
the flush of our awakening from the darkness and the mystery of faint
and inactive dreaming, in the resurrection from our daily grave, in the
first tremulous sensation of the beauty of our being, in the most
glorious perception of the lightning of our life; there, indeed, our
expatiation of spirit, when it meets the pulse of outward sound and joy,
the voice of bird and breeze and billow, _does_ demand some power of
liberty, some space for its going forth into the morning, some freedom
of intercourse with the lovely and limitless energy of creature and
creation.
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