when people sit before a fire; it would be
intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.

The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they
rose to go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it was as cold as
winter. The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the
sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but it sang.

SEVENTH STUDY

We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival. We
have spent I don't know how many evenings in looking over Herbert's
plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain efforts to cover
with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms which the Young Lady
draws in her sketch of a small house.

I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite
modification, so that every house built in that style may be as
different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can be
adapted to our modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its spirit
instead of merely copying its old forms. But just now we are taking the
Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time, or as we should
probably have taken the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been colored.
Not even the cholera is so contagious in this country as a style of
architecture which we happen to catch; the country is just now broken
out all over with the Mansard-roof epidemic.

And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our
climate any more than in ecclesiastic architecture we adopt that which
is suited to our religion.

We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we
Protestants, and as the most of them are ill adapted to our forms of
worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion in
order to save our investments. I am aware that this would be a grave
step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard Luther and the right
of private judgment without reflection. And yet, if it is necessary to
revive the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in its spirit (that
we nowhere do), but in the form which served another age and another
faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great deal of money
invested in this reproduction, it may be more prudent to go forward than
to go back. The question is, "Cannot one easier change his creed than
his pew?"

I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but
I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to call