east as well as swallows. And when the houses are
grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic fellowship as to
subject their architecture to a common law, and so much civic pride as
to desire that the whole gathered group of human dwellings should be a
lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face of the earth. Not many
weeks ago an English clergyman,[11] a master of this University, a man
not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and great practical sense,
told me, by accident, and wholly without reference to the subject now
before us, that he never could enter London from his country parsonage
but with closed eyes, lest the sight of the blocks of houses which the
railroad intersected in the suburbs should unfit him, by the horror of
it, for his day's work.

[Footnote 11: Osborne Gordon.]

123. Now, it is not possible--and I repeat to you, only in more
deliberate assertion, what I wrote just twenty-two years ago in the last
chapter of the "Seven Lamps of Architecture"--it is not possible to have
any right morality, happiness, or art, in any country where the cities
are thus built, or thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated;
spots of a dreadful mildew, spreading by patches and blotches over the
country they consume. You must have lovely cities, crystallised, not
coagulated, into form; limited in size, and not casting out the scum and
scurf of them into an encircling eruption of shame, but girded each with
its sacred pomoerium, and with garlands of gardens full of blossoming
trees and softly guided streams.

That is impossible, you say! it may be so. I have nothing to do with its
possibility, but only with its indispensability. More than that must be
possible, however, before you can have a school of art; namely, that you
find places elsewhere than in England, or at least in otherwise
unserviceable parts of England, for the establishment of manufactories
needing the help of fire, that is to say, of all the +technai
banausikai+ and +epirretoi+, of which it was long ago known to be
the constant nature that "+ascholias malista echousi kai philon
kai poleos sunepimeleisthai+," and to reduce such manufactures to their
lowest limit, so that nothing may ever be made of iron that can as
effectually be made of wood or stone; and nothing moved by steam that
can be as effectually moved by natural forces. And observe, that for all
mechanical effort required in social life and in cities, water power is
infi