Amenity

“ Hence our household god, Comfort.
We are not satisfied merely with a home. It must be comfortable. The most wretched, indeed, are those who have no homes—the homeless! But not less wretched are those whose homes are without comfort—those of whom Charles Lamb once said, "The homes of the very poor are no homes." ”

“ Is it to be a formal reception-room, or a living-room? Is it to be a family library, or a man's study? If it is a small flat, do you aim at absolute comfort, artistically achieved, or do you aim at formality at the expense of comfort? ”

“ The table groans under the heavy and blood-bought luxuries gathered with pains-taking care, at home and abroad. Fields, forests, rivers and seas, are made tributary here. Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. ”

“ Beautiful, comfortable, elegant, picturesque,—an ideal house, full of exquisite objects and interesting associations, where persons the most distinguished for birth, position, mental accomplishments, and intellectual gifts, met in a social atmosphere of the highest cultivation and the greatest refinement,—the most perfect civilization could produce nothing more perfect in the way of enjoyment than the intercourse of that delightful mansion. ”

“ To be satisfied with what one has is to have happiness, whether one lives in a hovel or in a mansion. To live with economy in comfort was once enough. But the view of what constitute the necessities of comfort has changed vastly, and what would once have been accounted luxury may now be but a painful meagreness. ”

“ I plan a home some day of the most Spartan simplicity, all our needs cut down to the lowest and plainest of possessions, and yet a spirit of hospitality, of contentment, of gaiety, of self-reliance and mutual helpfulness. ”

“ After each one of us has learned to walk and talk and spell, and perhaps be president of something, and the mansion of self is crowded from floor to roof with business and recreation, still some room is left in the heart of nearly every man, vacant of his own concerns, ready for another's use—a sort of lodging for strangers, in fact, the spare room of benevolence. ”

“ This house, while agreeably situated, spacious, and well kept up, was abundantly provided, not only with everything indispensable for existence, but also with those thousand trifles and luxuries which are conventionally called comfort, and which rich persons, through lengthened habit, cannot do without. ”

“ A modern dwelling and luxurious in everything that wealth could suggest for comfort, it stood in the midst of exquisitely kept lawns, with groups of trees, parterres of flowers massed in colors, with greenhouse, grapery and garden ”

“ Presently, the man who had bought the house came to him and said, ‘Look thyself out a lodging, for I have need of my house.’ So he bethought himself and considering that he had nothing requiring a house, except his wife, who had borne him a son and daughter,—for he had not a servant left,—hired a room in one of the mean lodging houses and there took up his abode, after having lived in honour and luxury, with many servants and much wealth, and came to lack of one day’s bread. ”

“ In here we are given a suite of rooms containing elegance and comfort beyond our ability to describe. Here, as elsewhere, service is supreme and we are given anything and everything that our hearts can desire. Truly, we are being served as though we are kings of Earth. ”

“ Domesticity asserts its command, by your order, in the aspect of every cottage in your park-like nest. Homely comfort radiates from the hearths and the faces of all who live under your delightful rule. ”

“ Those who had been bred in the downy lap of luxury, were charmed with tales of the hardy chase and deadly encounter; those to whom the artifices of dress constituted more [Pg 248] than half the pleasures of existence, delighted to dwell upon the simplicity of forest attire: those who gloried in the splendors of a city mansion,—halls, boudoirs, saloons, and conservatories,—thought how charming it would be to dwell beneath the wide canopy, or a deer-skin tent! ”

“ So I will ask everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation, and rest. ”

“ Your picture of 'rest' is a beautiful vision,—one which many of our friends have brought before our eyes at this time. But what can a man do, with seven children, and only his own hands to depend upon? I scruple not to say, that a ten-foot house, and bread and water diet, with the sense of rest to him, would be a luxury, and I trust some door will be opened to us by which we shall obtain it. ”

“ Certainly let the board be spread, and let the bed be dressed for the traveller, but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the law of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds. ”

“ All about the house and domain there is a perfection of comfort and domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience, which could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor of many successive generations, intent upon adding all possible improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a sort of permanence to the intangible present. ”

“ Gains and Losses.—In the making of a modern home there have been both addition and subtraction. Life has gained immeasurably in comfort and convenience for the well-to-do, but the comfortless quarters of the poor drive the man to the saloon and the child to the streets. ”

“ What especially soothes and gladdens the philanthropist is the spectacle of the superior comfort and more elevated condition in the scale of existence, universally prevailing. What with us are called luxuries, are here looked upon as necessaries, and are diffused over all classes. ”

“ It is wonderful how lively the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the rope, what places has he done before?—a thousand questions of this sort are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner. ”

“ I may easily go into a great household where there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. ”

“ For, supposing that we were for a moment to consider that we built a house merely to be lived in, and that the whole bent of our invention, in raising the edifice, is to be directed to the provision of comfort for the life to be spent therein ”

“ Every fresh comfort you realize around you will add to your happiness; every improvement within-doors or without will raise a sensation of gratitude and delight in your mind, to which those that revel in the habitual enjoyment of luxury, and even of the commonest advantages of civilization, must in a great degree be strangers. ”

“ In the sumptuous dwellings of the wealthy, the gentry stretch their pampered bodies on the soft couch of ease and warmth, imitated to a nicety by their dependents. In the dwellings of the middle class, comfort if not absolute sumptuousness is displayed and enjoyed. ”

“ The industrious worm which has built so choice a home may have enjoyed the sense of comfort and security for a period representing an honourable age, while, according to the standards of man, the home was not worth the building for so short a tenancy. ”

“ This house furnished pleasure boats, fishing apparatus, guides, &c., for the accommodation of parties of pleasure, and others who wished to spend a few hours amid these romantic and picturesque scenes of sublimity and grandeur, where nature in her wildest freaks had combined the gentle and lovely, which seems to soothe and calm the spirits with the awfully grand, the terribly majestic, and the wild and romantic, as if calculated at once to interest the curious, to please the merry, to add gloom to solitude, and fervor to devotion ”

“ One who has been allowed access to those richly laden shelves may be allowed, without violating the sanctity of hospitality, to bear witness to the simplicity, sincerity, and serenity investing the eventide of a true life with that ineffable splendor which has in it the soul's strongest assurance of a dayspring beyond the mists of Life's mirage. ”

“ Our associations of convenience, home-comfort, and respectability are connected with a certain style of building, which has been evolved by the wants, manners, and customs of the people. Any great deviations from a style that has been thus fixed, cannot be perfectly agreeable. ”

“ Everything in the room is clean, well-kept, and in its exact place, yet there is no suggestion of primness about the whole. Rather the atmosphere is one of the orderly comfort of a simple, hard-earned prosperity, enjoyed and maintained by the family as a unit. ”

“ The Lord's is the earth and the fulness thereof, and men are but the managers of His vast estate. The world is like a great and beautiful mansion, with its lofty blue ceilings and its brilliant lights and its carpets of velvety green and its vast tables loaded with rich viands and fruits and garnished with flowers, and over all this mart presides. ”

“ The rapidly passing through this vast suite of rooms, in a space of time little, if at all, exceeding an hour, with leisure just to cast one poor longing look of astonishment on all these stupendous treasures of natural curiosities, antiquities, and literature, in the contemplation of which you could with pleasure spend years, and a whole life might be employed in the study of them--quite confuses, stuns, and overpowers one. ”

“ The opportunity to enjoy the ownership of a home strongly appeals, not alone to our avarice, but to the instincts of our nature. For [Pg 186] here is located the citadel of our hopes and fears, our joys and griefs; here congregated are ties the most sacred, and a love devoted. It is the ever-burning light, the steady heat-giving impulse, and inspiration to deeds of domestic utility or of noble daring. ”

“ But how is the comfort of the city man enhanced by one, that is, if the attendant discomforts are weighed in the same scale? It has sometimes seemed to me that the wealthy or successful man invests in a prodigious mansion as a sort of testimonial ”

“ Its success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a home, a place endowed with the greatest blessings any home can have: contentment and affection. ”

“ The house, with its treasures of beautiful and artistic furnishings, which represented the lifelong gatherings of a man renowned for his taste; the extensive grounds, with gardens and vineries and forests of glass, providing an endless summer of blossom; the income, that in itself was a fortune, and held such inexhaustible possibilities of good. ”

“ May Heaven aid those whom he has lured from positions of usefulness and rectitude of conduct into the gloom of his own night of sin, to return and “enter while there's room”! There are many mansions in the Father's house, many places in infinite Love where reform is ample to furnish the passport into God's presence, the divine Light and Love. ”

“ And here this morning, in this house, men are sitting who own very many of those tenements, who are getting the rent from them every month, who could, without suffering one single sorrow, without depriving themselves of one necessity or even luxury of life, so change the surroundings of these people that they would enjoy the physical life God gave them, and be able to see His love in the lives of His Disciples. ”

“ We wish that some of our friends whom, in splendid mansions, we have heard fretting and repining because they had not this elegance here, and that improvement there, could have heard the exclamations and seen the sparkling eyes of our humble friends as they surveyed their new tenement. ”

“ Even more influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room ”

“ It is out of all keeping, or propriety with other things, as we in this country have them, and the indulgence of all such fancies is sooner or later regretted. Substance, convenience, purpose, harmony—all, perhaps, better summed up in the term EXPRESSION—these are the objects which should govern the construction of our dwellings and out-buildings, and in their observance we can hardly err in the acquisition of what will promote the highest enjoyment which a dwelling can bestow. ”

“ In a room, magnificently furnished, containing every appliance a morbid attention to personal comfort could need, or the invention of luxurious imagination could devise, were seated an elderly gentleman, his wife and three daughters. ”

“ I have sometimes thought that I love so well the accidents of this temporary terrestrial residence, its endeared localities, its precious affections, its pleasing variety of occupation, its alternations of excited and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes nearest to the longings of the natural man, that I might be wickedly homesick in a far-off spiritual realm where such toys are done with. ”

“ Comfort, solid comfort, is the keynote of Hurley, indoors and out. Its houses, built along the one village street, their farm lands stretching back beyond them, have an aspect of substantial prosperity and cheer. ”

“ We have, for instance, yet to see that all our houses, however small, shall have a proper number of bedrooms, large, light, and airy—for we spend one-third of our lives in them. We have also to see that both beauty and fitness shall be properly considered in building a house. ”