iddle or ending,
and, with the long viscera of brickwork trailing off behind, it looks as
if just wrenched out of the side of some Florentine or Genoese mansion.
And, in very truth, is it not?

The common cause of these errors and incongruities is our self-abasement
to a style which depends for its effect upon continuous uniformity of
design, while, from the very nature of our society, our houses must be
diverse in size and pretension. We are a social people, it is true, but
our individualities are strongly marked, and our dwellings, while
designed with reference to each other, should never be too uniform. How
frightful those white-shuttered brick piles which monotonize the streets
of Philadelphia! But to assert its individuality the house need not
shoot up like a vein of trap rock through a stratum of conglomerate: an
American rises, not through the mass, but out of it.

Have you ever seen a street view of Bruges or Nuremberg, those fantastic
old cities of mediaeval Germany? You remember them, the tall gabled
houses with projecting stories, the picturesque grouping of porch and
gallery and oriel, the curious old bridges and the Gothic fountains, the
grotesque carvings over the doorways, and the perfect population of
dormer windows and turrets and lanterns. And did you not, _entre nous_,
like it better than those stiff, formal views of the French and Italian
cities? Was not the poetry more pleasing than the prose?

'Oh well,' you say, 'these turrets and gables and things look all very
well in pictures, but they would never do for our streets: we must build
in some regular style, you know.' The same old error again, the same
servile imitation of a vague something or other, which we call classic.
Do you think the old German burghers built in any regular style? Not a
bit of it. They built just what they wanted, in the most natural and
plain-spoken manner. If they wanted a porch over the door, or a bay
window at a certain corner, or a turret to enjoy some favorite
view--they made them, put them just where they were needed. Convenience
was everything, and precedent nothing.

Is there not something about this individual originality, this perfect
freedom of thought and expression, that might be adapted to express the
American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and
cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms
of natural growth to make room for the unsightly exotic?

Nature h