Great House

“ A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck. ”

“ My own home—bearing the tranquil name of Golden End—is an ancient manor; out of a sandy lane turns an avenue of great Scotch firs, passing the house and inclining gradually in its direction. The house is a strange medley; one part of it is an Elizabethan building, mullioned, of grey stone; one wing is weather-tiled and of simple outline. The front, added at some period of prosperity, is Georgian, thickly set with large windows; over all is a little tiled cupola where an alarm bell hangs. ”

“ The mansion-house, or, according to local phraseology, the great house, is placed on a rising ground, and judiciously overlooks the works, which are extensive, and in the most complete repair; the mill is turned by a well-supplied water-wheel, and the boiling-house contains a double and single set of coppers. The overseer’s house and offices, the hospital, and a building for the negro children, are severally large, and well adapted for their purposes. ”

“ but upon the marriage of the young 'squire, it had received the improvement of a farm-house elevated into a cottage, for his residence, and Uppercross Cottage, with its veranda, French windows, and other prettiness, was quite as likely to catch the traveller's eye as the more consistent and considerable aspect and premises of the Great House, about a quarter of a mile farther on. ”

“ The lessee of his estates had let them advantageously to four substantial farmers; one of whom occupied the venerable old manor-house. Its quaint wooden gables and ornamental carpentry always arrested the attention of the passer by their venerable appearance.
A bay window, with five lights in two divisions, marked very distinctly the situation of the great hall; a noble apartment used only by the tenant as a vast store-room for the produce of his orchard and his garden. ”

“ Of course there was a Great House at Allington. How otherwise should there have been a Small House? ”

“ After prowling about for some time, I at length found my way to a lateral portal, which was the every-day entrance to the mansion. I was courteously received by a worthy old housekeeper, who, with the civility and communicativeness of her order, showed me the interior of the house. The greater part has undergone alterations and been adapted to modern tastes and modes of living: there is a fine old oaken staircase, and the great hall, that noble feature in an ancient manor-house, still retains much of the appearance it must have had in the days of Shakespeare. ”

“ The house itself is in an excellent state of preservation. The partially panelled walls, the quaint windows with wide sills, the large and cheerful fireplaces in which the original dogs still do duty, belong distinctively to colonial days. The small, high windows fitted with wooden shutters show the great thickness of the house wall, and the whole surroundings impress one with solidity and comfort. ”

“ In a word, a hundred points of deep and exciting interest, picturesquely beautiful and historically interesting, may be seen and “taken note of,” from the several points to which a drive through the Park conducts.
We give an engraving of the mansion. Parts of it are as old as the reign of Henry VIII., but its outward signs of remote age are few; it seems built for comfort; it is thoroughly a domestic house; the rooms are neither large, lofty, nor stately; but all of them are made to live in—so many parts of a home. We may except the Great Hall, however ”

“ The Main Building had originally been a handsome old dwelling house, whose spacious rooms were now used as parlors, library, offices and teachers' rooms. There were wide, beautiful porches in front and back, and massive stone steps, ending in great stone urns overflowing with bright flowers at the foot of each flight. ”

“ The house, which was as large as a good-sized English country mansion, is constructed of timber of the finest quality, beautifully worked, painted and varnished; and with moderate care a mansion of this kind will last, in this climate, a couple of hundred years, which to the American mind is an eternity. There were artists from New York, and the staff of an upholsterer and decorator of great renown from the Empire City were still busily engaged in the place as we went through the rooms. ”

“ But "my house," as some have named the great square mansion, is nobody's house but its owners'. No guest who can not return hospitality in equal style is asked to tarry for a night there. All ministers sojourning in the place are directed by them to the humble parsonage for entertainment. ”

“ Our new residence is a large lonely Mansion, with no connexion with any other House, but standing in the heart of Lincolnshire fens, over which it looks through an advantageous opening: comprising a great variety of windmills, and drains, and willow-pollards, and an extensive assortment of similar articles, that are not much calculated to invite inspection. ”

“ The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments) , had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; ”

“ And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It is brighter!" ”

“ But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other—dumb for ever. ”

“ Not even on finding himself in a well-ordered house does a man step forward and say to himself, I must be master here! Else the lord of that house takes notice of it, and, seeing him insolently giving orders, drags him forth and chastises him. So it is also in this great City, the World. Here also is there a Lord of the House, who orders all thing:—
“Thou are the Sun! ”

“ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. ”

“ Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; ”

“ The place in Lincolnshire is all alive. By day, guns and voices are heard ringing in the woods, horsemen and carriages enliven the park-roads, servants and hangers-on pervade the Village and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night, from distant openings in the trees, the row of windows in the long drawing-room, where my Lady's picture hangs over the great chimney-piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame. ”

“ The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm, wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution. ”

“ The dwelling-houses, which were filthy and pestilential in the Marche and the Bourbonnais, were, at least in our neighborhood, stoutly built and healthy, as is proved by a large number of old country houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are still standing and easily recognizable by their vast tiled roofs, their windows framed with stone cut in the shape of prisms, and their attic windows surmounted by great sheaves of grain moulded in terra cotta. ”

“ The present mansion, remodelled, is to-day a famous landmark. It is considered an excellent example of a colonial home, with its pitched roof, its huge stone chimneys covered with mortar, its dormer windows, and its Georgian porch. One enters through the wide doors into a noble hallway extending entirely through the house, the woodwork showing fine panelling of white pine. The box stairs rise by easy treads to the wide landing, where a colonial window gives light to the apartment. ”

“ Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation were the fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as those of a monastery. ”

“ This confusion of two essentially different types of room, designed for essentially different phases of life, has been caused by the fact that the architect, when called upon to build a grand house, has simply enlarged, instead of altering, the maison bourgeoise that has hitherto been the accepted model of the American gentleman's house; for it must not be forgotten that the modern American dwelling descends from the English middle-class 135 house, not from the aristocratic country-seat or town residence. ”

“ Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. ”

“ I was saying that nothing had been so slow in its progress in the world as domestic architecture. Temples, palaces, bridges, aqueducts, cathedrals, towers of marvelous delicacy and strength, grew to perfection while the common people lived in hovels, and the richest lodged in the most gloomy and contracted quarters. The dwelling-house is a modern institution. It is a curious fact that it has only improved with the social elevation of women. Men were never more brilliant in arms and letters than in the age of Elizabeth, and yet they had no homes. ”

“ Nearly all historic English houses are what the agents call 'rich in old oak.' But what about those 'exquisite oriels,' those famous fireplaces, those stairways, those celebrated ceilings, and corbels—whatever they are? No one house, outside our brains, can have them all. ”

“ Green was resplendent with diamonds; and the house was so brilliantly illuminated, that the windows of carriages traversing that part of Beacon Street glittered as if touched by the noonday sun. A crowd collected on the Common, listening to the band of music, and watching the windows of the princely mansion, to obtain glimpses through its lace curtains of graceful figures revolving in the dance, like a vision of fairy-land seen through a veil of mist. ”

“ Of course there are old houses and old houses; not all possess this peculiar power to charm, and only those of the Elizabethan or Jacobean period, with their panelled halls and chambers, their beamed ceilings, their great gables, their clustering chimneys, their many mullioned windows and big fireplaces, hold it over me. Those of the Queen Anne or Georgian age leave me cold; they are too formal; they lack the sense of mystery and atmosphere of romance. ”

“ These dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighbourhood in which the wanderer may happen to find himself. For myself, I have never been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large mansion with Doric columns and a pediment of white-painted timber; in Italy I have made imaginary proposals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on the roof. ”

“ The grand old gabled house, with its lofty square towers, its Jacobean entrance gateway and dovecote, and the fantastically clipped box-trees and sun-dial of its quaint old-fashioned garden, possesses a charm which few other ancient mansions can boast, and this charm lies in its perfectly unaltered state throughout, even to the minutest detail. ”