Excerpt from A Home of the Olden Time

As Americans, we look with admiration and some degree of envy on substantial structures of other days that delight us abroad. We have indeed very few of our own. We know something of our progenitors. Tradition tells us of their character and household virtues. Smybert and Blackburn, Copley and Stuart reveal to us their personal appearance. History often records their public services. The institutions they planted, their works of utility need no other monument. But we should have been better pleased had they also left us more frequent memorials of their daily life. If their means and social condition admitted of no costly abodes, many such as they had have perished, which might well have been preserved. A few remain, others are still remembered of which some account should be transmitted to coming generations. Some of these in their pristine condition were models of elegance and taste, and would compare favorably in comfort and convenience with any of modern contrivance.

It is a great and laudable achievement to erect a stately edifice or even a dwelling of more moderate pretensions, complete in detail and arrangement, faultless as a work of art yet precisely adapted to its use. Where the organ of construction has liberal development, to conjure up out of airy nothings or dim visions of the past, pleasant abodes such as Le Sage created for his hero, castles such as Spain has been ever famed for, affords diversion from graver thought. In the seemingly endless watches of the night, on weary pilgrimages or when the brain is quickened into fever, such indulgence soothes and tranquillizes beyond poppy or chloroform.

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