228. The breakfast-room must have a prospect, and an extensive one; the
hot roll and hyson are indiscussable except under such sweet
circumstances. But he must be an awkward architect who cannot afford an
opening to one window without throwing the whole mass of the building
open to public view; particularly as, in the second place, the essence
of a good window view is the breaking out of the distant features in
little well-composed _morceaux_, not the general glare of a mass of one
tone. Have we a line of lake? the silver water must glance out here and
there among the trunks of near trees, just enough to show where it
flows; then break into an open swell of water, just where it is widest,
or where the shore is prettiest. Have we mountains? their peaks must
appear over foliage or through it, the highest and boldest catching the
eye conspicuously, yet not seen from base to summit, as if we wanted to
measure them. Such a prospect as this is always compatible with as much
concealment as we choose. In all these pieces of management, the
architect's chief enemy is the vanity of his employer, who will always
want to see more than he ought to see, and than he will have pleasure in
seeing, without reflecting how the spectators pay for his peeping.
229. So much, then, for position. We have now only to settle the
questions of form and color, and we shall then have closed the most
tiresome investigation which we shall be called upon to enter into;
inasmuch as the principles which we may arrive at in considering the
architecture of defense,[51] though we hope they may be useful in the
abstract, will demand no application to native landscape, in which,
happily, no defense is now required; and those relating to sacred
edifices will, we also hope, be susceptible of more interest than can
possibly be excited by the most degraded branch of the whole art of
architecture, one hardly worthy of being included under the name--that,
namely, with which we have lately been occupied, whose ostensible object
is the mere provision of shelter and comfort for the despicable shell
within whose darkness and corruption that purity of perception to which
all high art is addressed is, during its immaturity, confined.
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