moved to another point of view. As we look back upon those days as well as we can through the veil of years, it would seem as though we were obsessed by a search for form, for form above all; and as though the subtler things that give character, such as color and texture and that indefinable, indescribable spirit the craftsman bestows upon the work of his hands and leaves as our most precious legacy, had in great measure escaped us.
Maturity cares more for the human things youth hurries past in youth’s preoccupation; for the aspect of new skies; for the color of the light; for the landscapes that once meant almost regrettable interruptions of our eager flight from one “good architectural town” to another-— that now we find arc1 good in so many other ways—and which now make beautiful links between the old cities like the modulation of one musical motif into another, and which we savor as lovely interludes. But all the time, under the breathless search for that which youth went forth to find and pursued. with an ardor that is like nothing on earth so much as the mad ecstasy with which a bee rifles a flower oblivious of the world about her—under all this obsession the subconsciousness was quietly storing away a thousand im
pressions, sounds, sights, scents, to lie dormant until awakened by some touch upon the chords of memory.
To each man Iris own, experience. Maturity need not regret the intensity of youth’s concentration no matter how narrow it was; the great thing was to experience, to feel deeply; architecture was what he cared most for, it was what he went “for to admire and for to see;” and perched on a ladder in Athens or swung in a scaffold on the facade of the Palace of the Doges many beau
tiful things passed unheeded; the subconscious had not been discovered in those days; yet thanks to that silent busy friend, let the right string vibrate and he remembers the poppy that nodded like a fleck of fire against the blue that arches over the City of the Violet Crown, high on a broken entablature of the Erechtheion; the breeze that used to spring up about ten o’clock of a morning of early Summer and bowed the grasses between the
fallen marbles; the blue of Lake Nemi; the thunderous mist that filled the wood beside the waterfall at Tivoli; the roses that bloomed in December in the Villa d’Este and, from the terrace, the cloud shadows turning the tawny vineyards to purple as they drifted out over the Campagna before a breeze that made the olive orchards flash from gray-green to silver as its cool hand ruffled the leaves.
Maturity’s consolation for missing things in youth is that there is just so much more to see and do, to feel with a different but not diminished intensity, now, when we come again.
Tea in Old Ciielsea
A September afternoon, the yellowing leaves drifting softly down in the still air, neat doorways and their gleaming brasses, an atmosphere of leisure and peaceful ease —hard to reconcile with the echoes of old contentions that come to mind in these haunts of the spirited Butterfly, Battersea Bridge, The Reach, Oheyne Walk, Che-yne Row, the White House— an atmosphere strongly reminiscent of Greenwich Village before the Villagers came, and of our own Chelsea of forty years ago.
Tea time approaches. The Sign of the Blue Perrokeet attracts us and we enter and command refreshment. Tea is so intimately connected with England, it is so much an institution like the
THE RIALTO BRIDGE
(From the water color by H. Van Buren Magonigle)
Maturity cares more for the human things youth hurries past in youth’s preoccupation; for the aspect of new skies; for the color of the light; for the landscapes that once meant almost regrettable interruptions of our eager flight from one “good architectural town” to another-— that now we find arc1 good in so many other ways—and which now make beautiful links between the old cities like the modulation of one musical motif into another, and which we savor as lovely interludes. But all the time, under the breathless search for that which youth went forth to find and pursued. with an ardor that is like nothing on earth so much as the mad ecstasy with which a bee rifles a flower oblivious of the world about her—under all this obsession the subconsciousness was quietly storing away a thousand im
pressions, sounds, sights, scents, to lie dormant until awakened by some touch upon the chords of memory.
To each man Iris own, experience. Maturity need not regret the intensity of youth’s concentration no matter how narrow it was; the great thing was to experience, to feel deeply; architecture was what he cared most for, it was what he went “for to admire and for to see;” and perched on a ladder in Athens or swung in a scaffold on the facade of the Palace of the Doges many beau
tiful things passed unheeded; the subconscious had not been discovered in those days; yet thanks to that silent busy friend, let the right string vibrate and he remembers the poppy that nodded like a fleck of fire against the blue that arches over the City of the Violet Crown, high on a broken entablature of the Erechtheion; the breeze that used to spring up about ten o’clock of a morning of early Summer and bowed the grasses between the
fallen marbles; the blue of Lake Nemi; the thunderous mist that filled the wood beside the waterfall at Tivoli; the roses that bloomed in December in the Villa d’Este and, from the terrace, the cloud shadows turning the tawny vineyards to purple as they drifted out over the Campagna before a breeze that made the olive orchards flash from gray-green to silver as its cool hand ruffled the leaves.
Maturity’s consolation for missing things in youth is that there is just so much more to see and do, to feel with a different but not diminished intensity, now, when we come again.
Tea in Old Ciielsea
A September afternoon, the yellowing leaves drifting softly down in the still air, neat doorways and their gleaming brasses, an atmosphere of leisure and peaceful ease —hard to reconcile with the echoes of old contentions that come to mind in these haunts of the spirited Butterfly, Battersea Bridge, The Reach, Oheyne Walk, Che-yne Row, the White House— an atmosphere strongly reminiscent of Greenwich Village before the Villagers came, and of our own Chelsea of forty years ago.
Tea time approaches. The Sign of the Blue Perrokeet attracts us and we enter and command refreshment. Tea is so intimately connected with England, it is so much an institution like the
THE RIALTO BRIDGE
(From the water color by H. Van Buren Magonigle)