Brice

“ No two red bricks are alike. Some deepen into rich and mottled purples, others kindle into ruddy orange, or subside into greys of the loveliest gradation. These accidental combinations of time-stain and emerald moss-growth with the cloudy hues of the irregular, brick wall, are sufficient of themselves to satisfy an eye open to perceive and understand them. ”

“ Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.—The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is the purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest. ”

“ Fly-wheels could be built of oak and pine, and hooped with iron. Fly-wheels did not discourage us.
But brick? One brick is, say, sixty-four cubic inches only. This moon,—though we made it hollow,—see,—it must take twelve million brick.
The brick alone will cost sixty thousand dollars!
The brick alone would cost sixty thousand dollars. There the scheme of the Brick Moon hung, an airy vision, for seventeen years,—the years that changed us from young men into men. The brick alone, sixty thousand dollars! ”

“ And to care whether a thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully on its course. ”

“ L. No, Florrie; you are only to fancy flying bricks, as you saw the slates flying from the roof the other day in the storm; only those slates didn't seem to know where they were going, and, besides, were going where they had no business: but my spell-bound bricks, though they have no wings, and what is worse, no heads and no eyes, yet find their way in the air just where they should settle, into towers and roofs, each flying to his place and fastening there at the right moment, so that every other one shall fit to him in his turn.
LILY. But who are the fairies, then, who build the crystals? ”

“ The night is very clear and fine, the face of heaven is smiling amid myriads of twinkling stars; the northern horizon is lit up with the rays of dancing beams of an aurora, while the woods and silent-flowing river are illuminated by our camp fire; our voyageurs are fast asleep upon the ground before us, and not a sound is heard save that of the leaping, crackling flames and the low tone of our own voices as we chat merrily. And now, as my companion reads a chapter in his French pocket Bible, and I pencil down these sketches [Pg 41] of fact and fancy by the light of the burning fagots—but hark! ”

“ Every brick in the miles of viaducts or tunnels, houses, or public buildings, to which we have made allusion, was laid separately, and it is only steady perseverance, brick after brick, on the part of the bricklayer, which could have raised these great masses of work. Let me add that no one brick out of the many laid is of no importance. ”

“ The anxiety this possibility involved nerved me to instant action. I leaped forward to the one clear spot singled out for me by chance and began a hurried scrutiny of the short strip of wall which was all that was revealed to me on the right-hand side. Did it hold the marked brick? My little candle shook with eagerness and it was with difficulty I could see the face of the brick close enough to determine. But fortune favored, and presently my eye fell on one whose surface showed a ruder, scratched cross. ”

“ Not being plastered, the building has retained its natural dark red colour of old brick, and at close view, I am told, it produces a gloomy, even threatening, impression, especially on nervous people, to whom the red bricks recall blood and bloody lumps of human flesh. ”

“ Sun-dried brick, a material but little superior to the natural clay of which it was composed, constituted everywhere the actual fabric, which was then covered thinly and just screened from view by a facing, seldom more than a few inches in depth, of a more enduring and handsomer substance. ”

“ If you were built into the wall, as you ought to be, you would amount to something, and have an honest man’s place. Then you would be of some use.’ So I made up my mind that I would not be like that brick any longer. ”

“ A black shape, blacker than starless night, was beginning to creep across the sun’s rim, growing slowly broader and broader, and then, though it was scarcely an hour past midday, a darkness as of sudden midnight began to fall upon the valley, and here and there stars began to flicker palely in the sky as the black shape ate its way into the dimmed brightness of the fading sun. ”

“ III.—Nature of the Social Science.
OUT of bricks, well burnt, hard, and sharp-angled, lying in heaps by his side, the bricklayer builds, even without mortar, a wall of some height that has considerable stability. With bricks made of bad materials, irregularly burnt, warped, cracked, and many of them broken, he cannot build a dry wall of the same height and stability. The dock-yard laborer, piling cannon-shot, is totally unable to make these spherical masses stand at all as the bricks stand. ”

“ Here are whole beds of clay baked until they have taken on the color and character of hard-burned brick or unglazed pottery. The resonance of the dry fragments under the hammer or the wheels of our vehicle is precisely that of broken terra-cotta. Sometimes the top of the butte is bare and red; sometimes the whole mass, from top to bottom, has been burned, and at a distance seems like a brick-kiln fallen into ruin. ”

“ Then a bricklayer and his wife defied the heavens to fall, threw aside traditions and began to apply exact knowledge to brick-laying. As a result, they learned how to lay bricks three times as rapidly as the best workman had ever been able to before—and with less fatigue. ”

“ It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon.”
Then we had to calculate its size. You can see, on the old moon, an edifice two hundred feet long with any of the fine refractors of our day. But no such refractors as those can be carried by the poor little fishermen whom we wanted to befriend, the bones of whose ships lie white on so many cliffs, their names unreported at any Lloyd’s or by any Ross,
Themselves the owners and their sons the crew. ”

“ The light on the surface is all-important, as any shadows or oblique lights mask the differences of the bricks; either all in sunshine, or better, all in shade, is needful to see the bricks. A distant general view will often show differences of tint in the courses, yellow, red,{163} brown, grey, or black, which prove the mass to have been brickwork. ”

“ You would not have believed that the man who walked so quietly along the greensward with the moonlight on his face, could have been the same person who stood on [112] the deck of that brig and superintended the number of lashes that should be dealt on the back of a human being. Once or twice, as his glance fell on some familiar object, a sweet brier bush, perhaps, or a cluster of tall mulleins that had grown by the footpath since he was a child, his eyes would fill with tears. There was something holy and homelike in the stillness that made a child of this cruel man. ”

“ The other parts of the summit of this hill are occupied by immense fragments of brick-work, of no determinate figure, tumbled together and converted into solid vitrified masses, as if they had undergone the action of the fiercest fire, or been blown up with gunpowder, the layers of the bricks being perfectly discernible ”

“ These are absolutely better in brick than in stone, because, as no thought and no taste are necessary in the man who carves them, it were better the human intellect should be as little as possible deadened by working upon them. The windows of S. Katharine, Lübeck, show how these moulded bricks may be used in conjunction with stone traceries, and with admirable effect, when compared with the attempts at tracery in brick which this and other churches here exhibit. ”

“ On the large table stands a chest of building blocks, in the form of bricks, each side about one-sixth of the size of actual bricks, the finest and most variable material that can be offered a boy for purposes of representation. Sand or sawdust, too, have found their way into the room, and fine green moss has been brought in abundantly from the last walk in the beautiful pine forest. It is free time, and each one has begun his own work. ”

“ That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction. Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether unknown to me—a feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could hear the silence.
A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone was thus partly protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed. ”

“ A remarkable kind of floating brick, used by the ancients, has been made the subject of investigation in modern times, with a view to the suggestion of improvements in the making of bricks for particular purposes. Pliny states that at various places in Spain, in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, bricks were made which, besides possessing considerable strength and a remarkable power of enduring heat, were yet of such small specific gravity, that they floated on the surface of water. ”

“ Brick is admirably adapted for the climate of England, and for the frequent manufacturing nuisances of English blue country: for the smoke, which makes marble look like charcoal, and stucco like mud, only renders brick less glaring in its colour ”

“ Bricks are often made, but they are frequently of inferior clay, and often merely sun-dried, or inefficiently burned, and are in no case equal to the well-squared and hardened article known by the same name in England. ”

“ The earth, being sufficiently kneaded, is brought to the bench of the moulder, who works the clay into a mould made of wood or iron, and strikes off the superfluous matter. The bricks are next delivered from the mould, and ranged on the ground; and when they have acquired sufficient firmness to bear handling, they are dressed with a knife, and staked or built up in long dwarf walls, thatched over, and left to dry. An able workman will make, by hand, 5,000 bricks in a day. ”

“ This evening, when the sun slopes, your brick will probably be purple, a very little deviation from normal vision on your part would make it green. Even the sense that the object of perception is outside yourself may be fancy ”

“ The brickdust face is clean-shaven, the nose unmistakably Semitic; the hair is long, and the whiskers straggle to the collar. A drawing rests upon his knee; he looks forth with an eye like a sword, considering how he shall change the landscape. ”

“ Therefore the red of the brick is prevented from glaring upon the eye, by its falling in with similar colors in the ground, and contrasting finely with the general tone of the distance. This is another instance of the material which nature most readily furnishes being the right one. ”

“ The best quality of baked brick is of a yellowish-white tint, and very much resembles our Stourbridge or fire brick; another kind, extremely hard, but brittle, is of a blackish blue; a third, the coarsest of all, is slack-dried, and of a pale red. The earliest baked bricks are of this last color. ”

“ The bricks are patterned after the most artistic Greek and Renaissance designs, and the appearance of them when set in mantels is that of carved work. The joints between the courses of brick serve to break up any tendency to a heavy or monumental effect, and the general appearance of our mantels is exceedingly soft, rich, and harmonious. They have a pleasing effect which the eye never tires of. ”

“ As a result of further study, after the bricks are unloaded from the cars, and before bringing them to the bricklayer, they are carefully sorted by a laborer, and placed with their best edge up on a simple wooden frame, constructed so as to enable him to take hold of each brick in the quickest time and in the most advantageous position. ”

“ That the early inhabitants of many countries in the eastern [Pg 42] and central parts of Asia were acquainted with the use of bricks in building, we have abundant proof from the descriptions of intelligent travellers; and there are even grounds for attributing to them a very high degree of mechanical skill both in the making of the bricks and the formation of brick walls. ”

“ This is the bricklayer; hear the thud
Of his heavy load dumped down on stone.
His lustrous bricks are brighter than blood,
His smoking mortar whiter than bone.
Set each sharp-edged, fire-bitten brick
Straight by the plumb-line's shivering length;
Make my marvelous wall so thick
Dead nor living may shake its strength.
Full as a crystal cup with drink
Is my cell with dreams, and quiet, and cool....
Stop, old man! You must leave a chink;
How can I breathe? You can't, you fool! ”

“ He does not draw his sabre; his right hand hangs easily at his side. The breeze catches the plume in his hat and flutters it smartly. The sunshine rests upon his shoulder-straps, lovingly, like a visible benediction. ”

“ It very soon becomes as hard as brick, and resists the air and water much better than any brick I have seen in India.... As it is usually cut into the form of bricks for building, in several of the native dialects it is called the brick-stone (Iticacullee) [Malayāl. vettukal] .... The most proper English name would be Laterite, from Lateritis, the appellation that may be given it in science."—Buchanan, Mysore, &c., ii. 440-441. 1860.—"Natives resident in these localities (Galle and Colombo) are easily recognisable elsewhere by the general hue of their dress. ”