Indwelling

“ The dwelling-houses, and contiguous outhouses, are, in many instances, of the colour of the native rock, out of which they have been built.... These humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected;—to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock—so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty! ”

“ New dwellings arose close against dwellings; rocks took the place of sand and marsh; houses sought the sky, being forced, like trees enclosed in a narrow compass, to seek in height what they were denied in breadth. ”

“ How endless the interchange of woods and meadows, glens, dells, and broomy nooks, without number, among thy banks and braes! And then of human dwellings—how rises the smoke, ever and anon, into the sky, all neighbouring on each other, so that the cock-crow is heard from homestead to homestead; while as you wander onwards, each roof still rises unexpectedly—and as solitary, as if it had been far remote. ”

“ Here, where the air is cool, pure, and soft, let us think of a hoarding round some old house which the labourers are pulling down, amid clouds of the white, blinding, parching dust of lime, on a sultry summer day. ”

“ I stepped forward and got among a little bunch of men, of whom, addressing myself to one, I asked what sort of shelter that dirty and wretched shed and those bleak and stony cells offered in the winter, when the wind blew with an edge and the sleet and rain fell. ”

“ In some places we would go forty or fifty miles without seeing a sign of human habitation, then suddenly we would come upon a small collection of adobe huts, that is, huts built of sun-dried, mud bricks. ”

“ A dreadful malady walked the land, and its victims lay in every house! The villages were depopulated, the little clusters of houses at cross roads were stricken, the lone shealing on the mountain side, the miserable cottage of the dreary moor, were each the scenes of desolation and death. ”

“ Men from the distant village were soon on the spot with buckets, and amid frightened cries, confused questions, and a general hurrying, scurrying of feet, a few had presence of mind to cover the main building with wet blankets, lest the trees now snapping and hissing might drop a blazing brand and the whole place go down. ”

“ No standing, for the ground swims away beneath one's feet: no taking shelter under a tree, for the wind breaks the thickest trunks like straw. One runs to his house, which is not farther off, perhaps, than from here to that good for nothing stump that hurt your foot, and the house has vanished, leaving in its place a hole, a stream, and a heap of well-washed stones. ”

“ Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments—part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in it again. ”

“ Not a dwelling was to be seen, not a sound heard to break the silence but the occasional rustle of wings, the croak of some huge bird, or the distant crash of some boulder or stone as it dislodged itself to fall heavily into the dark valley below. ”

“ Waiting for some reply, I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and how the house—of wood with a tiled roof—would not be proof against the weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and ooze were coated with lime, and how the choking vapour of the kiln crept in a ghostly way towards me. ”

“ I have lived in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the overflowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge: I have resided in other dwellings of rather higher pretensions, in which I have been awakened during every heavier night-shower by the rain-drops splashing upon my face where I lay a-bed. ”

“ Such dilapidated buildings, after the lapse of years, during which nature has gradually covered the effects of violence with creeping plants, and with weather-stains, exhibit, amid their decay, a melancholy beauty. ”

“ Their dwellings, are like huts, but strongly built of very large trees, and covered with palm leaves, secure from tempests and winds. In some places they are of such length and width that we found 600 souls in one single house. ”

“ Hence the mountains that lift their heads into the clear air, and are dotted over with the dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored in the darkness of their bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which they hold up to the sun and air. ”

“ No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife, before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage; while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. ”

“ I have been reading a little about the sites of ancient villas, but shall not trouble you with my views until I receive your answer: recollect we have a bad and variable climate, though we go out as much in the winter as summer; so that there must be at once shelter from the sun for our short summer, and warmth and shelter during the long winters and cold springs. ”

“ And the houses of ivory - Those remarkable for their magnificence and their ornaments, not built of ivory, but in which ivory vessels, ornaments, and inlaying abounded. Thus, then, the winter houses and the summer houses, the great houses and the houses of uncommon splendor, shall all perish. There should be a total desolation in the land. No kind of house should be a refuge, and no kind of habitation should be spared. ”

“ Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold experiences—our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily pain, for instance—belong to this or the other well-remembered place in the material habitation—that little white room with the window across which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind, with just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment ”

“ This habitation of man seemed like a nest in the grass, so thoroughly were the buildings and all the objects of human care harmonized with what was natural. The tall trees bent and whispered all around, as if to hail with sheltering love the men who had come to dwell among them. ”

“ To see women and children wandering in the severity of winter, with the broken remains of a well furnished house, and seeking shelter in every crib and hut, were matters that you had no conception of. ”

“ And in the country the single stately elm rising gracefully and benignantly over the wayside cottage, year after year like a guardian angel sending down its blessings of shade, moisture and coolness in times of drought, and shelter from the pitiless storm, recalls the tenderest associations of generation after generation that go from the old homestead. ”

“ The man who had built his house of mud was sad of heart as he sat in shelter, and his head cooled with shame as he thought of his empty boast. When therefore the rain ceased, he set himself with speed to build a house like unto his neighbour's, and from that day even until now is mud contemned and our houses built of rei as it was in the beginning. ”

“ Nature has completed this imperfect dwelling;—she has covered it over with a green roof, she has planted the empty enclosure with a garden of her own choosing, she has trained vines around the open doors and windows ”

“ But in what antiquities of rock and gorge and crumbled human dwelling did we not steep ourselves, from the eyries of the prehistoric cave-dwellers and the worn stone sarcophagi of the early Christians, to the toppling renaissance fronts and doorways that mingled on the hillside with the wild architecture of the first Seigneurs. ”

“ The home has a story of its own, as has the family. In primitive days there was little necessity of a dwelling-place, except as a nest for young or a cache for provisions. A cave or a rough shelter of boughs was a makeshift for a home. ”

“ Our dwellings, too, are ornamented with the variegated limestones,—the indurated tombs of molluscous life,—and our apartments heated with the carbon of primeval forests, and lighted with the gaseous element which it confines. ”

“ The houses are neither furnished nor put together for the climate, and we are fanned by these congealing winds, as though the apertures which admit them were designed to alleviate the ardours of an Italian sun. ”

“ First comes the choice of a very healthy site. Such a site will be high, neither misty nor frosty, and in a climate nei­ther hot nor cold, but temperate; further, without marshes in the neighbourhood. For when the morning breezes blow to ward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mists from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy. ”

“ Far around, lay an immense view, chiefly of green, naked, and undulating fields, intersected by stone walls. No other house was near; and villages lying at several miles distant, naked and gray on the uplands, were the only evidences of human life. ”

“ Our home is topsy-turvy, familiar objects are thrust aside, our goods and chattels are disarranged and turned out to be swept or beaten or otherwise relieved of their accumulated dust and cobwebs, and the clatter of brooms and pails and general hurry-scurry, with many irreparable breakages, make comfort and quiet impossible. ”

“ A wide ditch runs immediately at the back of these dwellings, which is filled and emptied daily by the tide. Attached to each hovel is a small scrap of ground for a garden, which, however, is for the most part untended and uncultivated. Such of these dwellings as I visited to-day were filthy and wretched in the extreme, and exhibited that most deplorable consequence of ignorance and an abject condition, the inability of the inhabitants to secure and improve even such pitiful comfort as might yet be achieved by them. ”

“ There is, first, the overcrowded dweller in our slums—poor men and women and boys and girls, dwelling as they do nine and ten and even more in a room—that room the only place for them to eat and sleep in. ”

“ Most of them had been used to living in the most miserable hovels, in the midst of vermin and every kind of filthiness, or to sleep in the streets, and under the hedges, half naked and exposed to all the inclemencies of the seasons. ”

“ Tucked away in odd corners, amid an ever-encroaching flood of "desirable modern residences," they seem to wait sadly for the hour when, in a cloud of dust and mortar, the relentless tapping of the pick serves for their funeral bell. ”

“ By-and-by we meet signs of inhabitants—a house or two; a few fields of mowing grass; the heaps of refuse at lead-mines, and our walk derives a pleasurable interest from the hourly change, the bleak, barren, and lonely, for the sheltered, the cultivated, and inhabited. ”

“ The houses of the more wealthy are sometimes two stories in height, with a flat roof surrounded by a wall, where the owners enjoy the evening air and look out upon the passersby. But even such houses are close, ill-ventilated, and unfit for habitation in a tropical climate. ”

“ One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... ”

“ All the shrubs, fir trees, stables, houses, etc., seem to be bent in a slanting direction, as by an immense pressure of air. They are all standing awry, so much awry that the chalets and cottages of the peasants seem to be tumbling down. ”

“ But when societies are formed, and commodious dwellings provided, where well sheltered, they may breathe a temperate air, amid summer’s scorching heat, and winter’s biting cold; sleep, when Nature requires, in ease and security ”

“ We huddled together for shelter under the thickest trees, listening to the howling of the wind, and sometimes hearing great crashing noises that made us fear almost to remain under shelter at all, lest the trees should fall upon our heads and kill us. ”

“ Villages of mud huts cluster outside the very walls of the compounds which contain the palatial residences of the Europeans; and the happy, careless children of the sun seem to revel in a picturesque squalor with every sign of contentment. ”