it as delightful
and romantic as we can." We know that the idea of Paradise and the New
Jerusalem to the imagination of the Middle Ages was always the fair
walled garden and the fenced city. The painters embodied the idea of
security and protection from the savage and destructive forces of nature
and man--a sanctuary of peace, a garden of delight.

[Illustration (f085): Roof-lines: Rothenburg.]

We have in modern times turned rather from the city as a complete and
beautiful thing, to the individual home, and to the interior of that,
and, in the modern competitive search for the necessary straws and
sticks to make our individualist-domestic composition of comfort and
artistic completeness, bowers are too often built upon the ruins of
others, or are fair by reason of surrounding degradation. The common
collective comfort and delight of the eyes is too often ignored, so that
it comes about that, if our modern cities possess any elements of beauty
or picturesqueness, it is rather owing to accidents and to the
transfiguring effects of atmosphere than to the beauty or variety of
architectural form and colour. We have to seek inspiration among the
fragments of the dead past in monuments and art schools.

[Organic and Accidental Beauty]

The modern development of the municipality and extension of its
functions may, indeed, do something, as it has done, and is doing,
something to protect public health and further public education; but we
have yet to wait for the full results, and everything must finally
depend upon the public spirit and disinterestedness of the citizens, and
in matters of art upon a very decided but somewhat rare and peculiar
sympathy and taste, as well as enthusiasm.

The absence of beauty of line, form, and proportion from the external
aspects of daily life in towns has probably a greater effect than we are
apt to realize in deadening the imagination, and it certainly seems to
produce a certain insensibility to beauty of line and composition, since
the perception must necessarily be blunted by being inured to the
commonplace and sordid. The instinct for harmony of line and form
becomes weakened, and can only be slowly revived by long and careful
study in art, instead of finding its constant and most vital stimulus in
every street.

For all that, however, an eye trained to observe and select may, even in
the dullest and dingiest street, find artistic suggestions,