Limber

“ I only say that if what I have done in my stone-edged geometrical beds is to be slighted because some fool has called it carpet-bedding, I shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I have worked on the lines of Nature. ”

“ Its light is like unto a stone most precious, and the materials of its structure are most costly; the building of the wall is of jasper, the city and the street of pure gold, and the foundations of the wall adorned with all manner of precious stones,574 while the several gates are each of a single pearl,—the mingled symbols of brilliancy, glory, costliness, and beauty. ”

“ The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, everything made of wood is inevitably attacked, and in a single night a strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into match-wood. ”

“ We see this in the papering of rooms, for how painful is the sensation of being in a small room, the walls of which are covered with a pattern that seems to make them come near, and almost close upon us, like the iron tomb which grew less and less every night, though by almost imperceptible degrees. ”

“ The modern habit of regarding the walls of a room chiefly as a background to pictures, furniture, or people, and perhaps the smallness of the average room, has brought rather small, thickly dispersed, leafy patterns into vogue, retiring in colour for the most part. ”

“ A piece of white marble often forms the centre to some device; where the flooring in a garden happens to be uniform in colour, a pattern is formed by a sprinkling of sand, which seems to lie as a part of the flooring unmoved under a fresh blowing wind.... ”

“ Great slabs of marble, squared fragments of wall and triangular pieces of roofing, are scattered about, half-buried in the earth. I have often, continued the young man, ‘passed hours at a time in examining the combats and the games, the dances and the processions, the beautiful and ludicrous figures which are sculptured there. ”

“ The beautifully painted walls, columns, and inlaid marble or mosaic floor, combine with the deep blue sky, forming so glorious a whole that the rooflessness is forgotten, and the eye reposes with delight on the assembled harmonies. ”

“ The houses we live in, the chairs we sit on,—in fact, most of our furniture, even to the frames of our pictures, the cars we ride in, and the very pencils we write with, are of wood which was once part of the living forest. ”

“ What a large floor! 'tis like a town!
The carpet, when they lay it down,
Won't hide it, I'll be bound;
And there's a row of lamps!—my eye!
How they do blaze! I wonder why
They keep them on the ground. ”

“ Whereof he makes his bed;
The table is of marble
Whereon he props his head.
His beard, not flax, but burning
With fierce and fiery glow,
Eight through the marble table
Beneath his chair does grow. ”

“ Every building must have a foundation and a frame of some kind to make it strong and give it shape. It is the same with the house we call our body. The frames of houses which men build are made of wood or iron; but the framework of the body is built of bones. Perhaps you have noticed that in the frames of buildings some pieces of timber are short, and some are long, and they are cut into many different shapes and sizes. So it is with the bones of the body. ”

“ In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments ”

“ A bed-post, grown colossal, jigs about the ceiling, And shadows, strangely altered, stain the walls, revealing Eagles, and rabbits, and weird faces pulled awry, And hands which fetch and carry things incessantly. ”

“ Now one of the hindmost legs closes in to the body, while all the others hold on—now another, and another, each in their turn; and by this skilful manoeuvre they have contrived to advance the body nearly an inch along the ceiling. One of the foremost legs advances again, and they proceed as before. ”

“ The hairs on the body are as the moss and grass on the walls, and the porous skin resembles the netted covering of the palace; the thighs and legs are as the columns of the edifice, and the feet with the ancles and toes, are as pedestals of the pillars. ”

“ A frail, thin floor and roof which soon melted into the clouds, and was more like a shadowy prism, such as we see through coloured glass, than a strong, firm foundation, and we might well distrust the feeble rampart which kept back that fearful weight of waters. ”

“ Have you ever noticed the sweet-scented wall flowers growing on an old stone wall? They have scarcely any earth for their roots, only a little bit between the stones, yet they make the old wall beautiful, and no flower smells sweeter. They teach us to be contented. ”

“ It can therefore be only the floor. It is not clear at first sight how a floor, which is a horizontal plane, can thrust; for to thrust, we must suppose the floor to expand in one direction, which cannot be. But see what happens. Give me your best attention.... Formerly, to compose a floor, large beams were laid from wall to wall, and upon these beams lighter pieces of timber, called joists; then on these was laid a bed of earth, gravel, or sand, and upon that a surface of mortar to receive the tiling. ”

“ The walls, the floors, the very furniture,—your hammock at night and your clothes in the morning,—feel damp and have a sort of clammy chill; and the sun comes out with such fitful gleams, that, intense as is its heat while it lasts, nothing becomes thoroughly dried. ”

“ On either side innumerable vertical lines lead the eye upward from the richly decorated ground-panels to the gorgeous walls, which are of crystal, for the stone-work is seen only as the framing of the glass, as the division between the windows. ”

“ You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it’s beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable mystery. ”

“ The stone walls sometimes seen are a sham, the stones being thin slabs nailed on the wooden framework of a house, like tiles or shingles, to rattle down in a harmless shower when the earth heaves and rocks. ”

“ Floors in the better houses were generally either of stone or of tile, The floors above ground were generally of wood, the flooring often set edgewise for the purpose of producing extreme rigidity and durability. ”

“ One wall is smooth as polished granite, red and white veins zigzagging across it like mysterious characters in the handwriting of God. In another place the whole face is rusty brown, as if of solid iron. ”

“ It is thirty feet long by eighteen feet wide. The walls are panelled from floor to ceiling, and richly adorned with carved work. At one end is a chimney-piece of massive but elegant design, profusely and exquisitely carved. ”

“ The workman wets the wall with his sponge, and applies his wood brush, for this the instrument practically becomes, since the ends of the fibers, directed towards the wall, act like so many closely packed hairs. ”

“ If, on the other hand, we view our rugs with the light of a better wisdom and happier experience, we will see the richest and softest of colours, the most harmonious shadings and blendings, medallions brilliant as jewels, or geometrical designs beautiful as the rose windows of a cathedral ”

“ If there are stakes drove into the ground on each side of the beds, about three feet high, with others in the centre about eight feet, having laths or hoops from the side to the centre, formed similar to the roof of a house, so that people may walk or sit under it, the canvass or awning being thin to admit of the light freely, the effect in the time of sunshine from the brilliancy of the colours is peculiarly gratifying. ”

“ Everything in nature is formed and placed for purpose, and here is the keynote of harmonious interior arrangement. For instance, here is a drawing-room with appropriate and well-chosen pieces of furniture. ”

“ The workmanship of the rooms being all good, and just out of the workman's hand, the joints of the boards of the flooring, and of the pannels of wainscotting are all true and tight, the more so as the walls, perhaps not yet thoroughly dry, preserve a dampness in the air of the room which keeps the wood-work swelled and close. ”

“ For the rest, if you have wooden work about the fireplace, which is often good to have, don’t mix up the wood and the tiles together; let the wood-work look like part of the wall-covering, and the tiles like part of the chimney. ”

“ Painted walls, and walls hung with tapestries and leather, are not possible to many of us, but they are the most magnificent of wall treatments. I know a wonderful library with walls hung in squares of Spanish leather, a cold northern room that merits such a brilliant wall treatment. ”

“ The floors were covered with rugs. Draperies and hangings softened the atmosphere; and the walls were hung with pictures; not many, but good and true; pictures that had power over those who looked upon them. ”

“ The first improvement seems to have been to build walls, up to about the height of a man's head—timber walls only at first—making use of trunks that had grown with a bend in them, as the corner posts, for the arch. ”

“ Easy to see the marks; the floor is deep in dust, and the walls are thick with it. On floor, mark of several feet—confused in struggle, may articulate separately later on—one woman's—also trailing of long skirt. On walls marks of hands, fingers outspread, as if trying to grasp. Some of the long marks down the wall others across. ”

“ The roof is a perfect forest of marble pinnacles, nearly all crammed with most valuable marble statues. The celebrated marble flower-bed contains several thousand flowers, each distinct and each different in design. ”

“ Nor was it the solid, lofty structure, fifteen or twenty feet high, which art has been glorifying for a thousand years, but a rude gibbet of unplaned wood, roughly nailed together, barely eight feet high, and not too heavy for a strong man to carry on his shoulders. ”

“ General Types.—In the designing of out-door furniture there are two suggestions from nature that may appropriately find expression. On the one hand large masses, as seen in the hills and rocks, suggest solidity, weight, and permanence. This idea is embodied in walls of masonry, stone posts, iron gates, stone or concrete pedestals, or in some other kind of heavy construction. ”

“ A bed, a table on and under which lay a multitude of wax-tablets, papyrus-rolls, metal-points, and writing-reeds, with a small bench, on which stood a water-jar and basin, composed the furniture of this room ”

“ These enchanting spots, where stones are couches and trees canopies, tempted us to sit down on a cushioned bowlder, or throw ourselves upon the thick carpet into which we sunk ankle-deep at every step. ”

“ The adaptation by which a limb, originally destined to grow free and bear foliage, has been converted into a living stick of timber, is a strange one, and affords a new illustration of the power of nature to fit itself to circumstances. ”

“ GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.—ENGLAND. ANALYSIS OF BUILDINGS.—FLOOR, WALLS, TOWERS, GABLES, COLUMNS. Floor, or Plan.
THE excellences or defects of a building are more due to the shape and size of its floor and, incidentally, of the walls and columns or piers which inclose and subdivide its floor than to anything else whatever. ”

“ The idea conveyed to the mind is of a huge green carpet or rug, and when the wind blows freely across the valley, it divides up the bushes into little ridges or furrows, which add to the uniqueness of the scene. ”

“ You lifted a curtain and found yourself in a small entresol, somewhat artistically painted—the whole and sole work of an artistic member who came one day with a formidable array of lumber and paint-pots and worked his will on the ancient wood. ”

“ In the space between the chimney and wall, forming the innermost recess, was placed a rude uncurtained bed, and on this lay extended, and delineated beneath the covering, a human form, the upper extremities of which was hidden from view by the projecting chimney. ”