. Everything about it touched the heart and
said something. I have never managed to see it yet, whether in sunlight,
cloud-light, or starlight, or the light of its own lamps, but that it
stood and spoke. It is a house that has genius. The genius of the earth
and the sky around it are all in it, of motherhood, of old age, and of
little children. It grew out of a spirit, a loving, eager,
putting-together, a making of relations between things that were
apart,--the portrait of a family. It is a very beautiful, eloquent
house, and hundreds of nights on the white road have I passed it by, in
my lonely walk, and stopped and listened to it, standing there in its
lights, like a kind of low singing in the trees, and when I have come
home, later, on the white road, and the lights were all put out, I still
feel it speaking there, faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its
young and old sleep, its memories and hopes of birth and death, lifting
itself in the night, a prayer of generations.

Many people do not care for it very much. They would wonder that I
should like a mind like it. It is a wandering-around kind of a house,
has thirty outside doors. If one doesn't like it, it is easy to get out
(which is just what I like in a mind). Stairways almost anywhere, only
one or two places in the whole building where there is not a piazza, and
every inch of piazza has steps down to the grass and there are no walks.
A great central fireplace, big as a room, little groups of rooms that
keep coming on one like surprises, and little groups of houses around
outside that have sprung up out of the ground themselves. A flower
garden that thought of itself and looks as if it took care of itself
(but doesn't). Everything exuberant and hospitable and free on every
side and full of play,--a high stillness and seriousness over all.

I cannot quite say what it is, but most country houses look to me as if
they had forgotten they were really outdoors, in a great, wide, free,
happy place, where winds and suns run things, where not even God says
nay, and everything lives by its inner law, in the presence of the
others, exults in its own joy and plays with God. Most country homes
forget this. They look like little isles of glare and showing off, and
human joylessness, dotting the earth. People's minds in the houses are
like the houses: they reek with propriety. That is, they are all
abnormal, foreign to the spirit, to the passion of self-delight, of
life,