Old house

“ I will not bore you with a description of the magnificent situation of this old house, nor how for miles, before it is reached over undulating hills, its great white columns and broad red roof appear against its mountain background as some classic structure of ancient time. But I will tell you that, casting my glance back and down over the broad sweep of hill and valley and woodland with the shadows of sunset creeping across them, I was impressed with its utter loneliness and comparative isolation. ”

“ The old House looks down approvingly on the happy company, for it has come into its own, sheltering in these later days kind, cheery people that respect its past glories and love its present homelike spirit, for to them its every stick and stone spell Home. ”

“ There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within my familiar recollection,—one of those peaked-gable (there are seven of them) , projecting-storied edifices, such as you occasionally see in our older towns,—a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it! ”

“ The little old house—its wooden walls sun-bleached to a ghostly gray—stood in an orchard above the road. The garden palings had fallen, but the broken gate dangled between its posts, and the path to the house was marked by rose-bushes run wild and hanging their small pale blossoms above the crowding grasses. ”

“ The streets are old and very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from house to house. Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was very quaint and lively. All this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one caught, through rusty gates standing ajar, of quiet sleepy courtyards, having stately old houses within, as silent as tombs. ”

“ Within fifty yards of the old house, farther back from the road, stands a stone house, of some dozen or twenty years' endurance,—an ugly affair, so plain is it,—which was built by the old man in his latter days. ”

“ There was an air, however, of bareness about the landscape, from the want of trees, which accorded well with the bald antiquity of the old house, and on a summer evening, when the sun was going down, and the slant beams peered over the green uplands, one might sit in that stone porch, and fancy oneself a yeoman of the olden time, so much did the ancient aspect of the whole scene sink into the heart. ”

“ The old house, standing a dozen yards from the roadside, is picturesque with the contrivances of neglect and decay. Through a door hanging loose upon its hinges the passer-by may behold the evidences of loneliness and gloom,—the very embodiment of desolation,—a void, a silence, that is almost portentous. ”

“ That strange-looking old house that you all know, with the limes and yew-trees before it, and the double line of very old yew-trees leading up from the gateway-tower to the porch—you know how no one will live there now because it is so eerie, and how even that bold bad lord that would come there, with his turbulent followers, was driven out in shame and disgrace by invisible agency. ”

“ They will see at once that the frame insulates it, draws attention to its beauties and enhances them. It is the same with a house. It may be good architecturally, but unless it be backed up by a green hill covered with wood, tall Scotch pines, the haunt of rooks, umbrageous beech, in autumn trees of gold, it is nothing but an architectural study. How naked, how forlorn a dear old house looks that has lost its timber that surrounded it! ”

“ Then we were transported to an old, time-grayed manor-house of many gables and great stacks of clustering chimneys, its ivy-grown walls and lichen-laden roof being backed by rook-haunted ancestral elms; the ancient home, with its quaint, old-fashioned garden and reed-grown moat encircling it, seemed, when we first came unexpectedly thereon, more like the fond creation of a painter or a poet than a happy reality. ”

“ It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality. ”

“ When I came out in front of the house from a short and steep but stately avenue I said to myself that here surely we had arrived at the farthest limits of what ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs can accomplish for the eye. It is impossible to imagine a more finished picture. And its air of solitude and delicate decay—of having been dropped into its grassy hollow as an ancient jewel is deposited upon a cushion, and being shut in from the world and back into the past by its circling woods—all this drives the impression well home. ”

“ Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of time. ”

“ Modern improvements have swept away, one by one, those old houses in all our cities to which time had given an aspect too much at variance with the tastes and requirements of a new generation. Even at the period in which our story opens—that is, in 1824—the house of which we are speaking already began to be pointed out as the Old Mansion—the name, par excellence, by which it was known in the city. ”

“ The little lady who entertained us is dead now; the old house, stripped of its ancient portraits and furniture, is, like many another, in the hands of farmer-people; its gardens have reverted to jungle. ”

“ Your distinction—and with a modern house, built for someone else, you could not escape a certain prominence—would be that someone else’s. With an old house, however modernised in its unessentials—unessential except from the housewife’s point of view—you make no pretence that you are more than a life tenant. ”

“ We emerged from the shrubbery on to a broad lawn. The house, a sprawling old mansion of red brick, was before us. We crossed the grass, and, turning an angle of the house, came to the porch, from which a drive curled away amongst the foliage of an avenue of elms.
The central hall was better fitted for a museum than a habitation of comfort-loving folk. Bronze gods and goddesses glimmered in the corners, dragons carved in teak glared upon the Eastern arms and armour that lined the walls, the duller hues of ivory and jade contrasted with the brilliant turquoise of old Pekin vases. ”

“ So often have they been repeated, and so closely interwoven with the history of the old house—whole works of fiction having been built on them—that when one goes from the warm sunlight across this colonial threshold, pushing back the heavy curved door with its iron bar and ponderous key, the sensation in one’s spinal region is distinctly creepy. ”

“ Or, speaking a little wider of the mark, the charming, rambling, low-gabled, many-staired, much-panelled mansion I speak of, would be a most delectable home for any person of taste who prefers an old house to a new. ”

“ You learn, too, how the old house grew from a very humble beginning to an eleven-room structure that covered a surprising amount of ground, as one generation after another passed and one owner succeeded another. ”

“ Far better live in the old house, with its inconveniences, and get the greatest possible happiness out of the ancient structure, than to build a new one and cover it with shining paints of many colors and a mortgage which sticks longer than the paints. ”

“ As well put new wine in old bottles, as an old house in a new dress; it is always an old house, despite the thin veneer of miscalled improvements. The architect can do nothing with it to the purpose; the carpenter can make nothing of it. ”

“ Babies slept interminably in huge prams under the trees. The old houses looked very gracious and friendly with the wistaria and ivy and countless kinds of green things scrambling about the rickety balconies and wandering through the open windows. Strangers walked in quiet couples along the path and admired the red roofs and the quaint brass knockers on the doors and the nice old names of the houses and the nice old ladies purring sleepily inside. ”

“ For a long while dwellers in cities have been accustomed to live one above another, and as your aunt won’t hear of a small house in the suburbs I am quite willing to put up with a third or fourth-story flat, and that is precisely why I cannot but regret giving up the idea of an old house. ”

“ It has some splendid old gateways, and plenty of old houses, two-thirds roof, one-third gable, and four-fifths dormer-window, with door-posts and corners carved in the leisurely way peculiar to that time. Really, one would think a man must have his house ordered before he was born, to have got it done in time to die in, in those days. I have speculated very much about this problem, and it puzzles me yet. So many of these old houses look as if it must have taken at least the years of one generation to have made the carvings on them ”

“ I like a house not too old, but having outward comeliness, with judicious arrangement of the interior, and all of those convenient contrivances of the plumber, the furnace-maker and the bell-hanger which make the merest mite of a modern dwelling incomparably superior in comfort to the most stupendous of marble palaces in the ancient times. ”

“ THE OLD MANSION-HOUSE.
STRANGER.
Old friend! why, you seem bent on parish duty,
Breaking the highway stones,—and 'tis a task
Somewhat too hard, methinks, for age like yours.
OLD MAN.
Why, yes! for one with such a weight of years
Upon his back. I've lived here, man and boy,
In this same parish, near the full age of man
For I am hard upon threescore and ten.
I can remember sixty years ago
The beautifying of this mansion here
When my late Lady's father, the old Squire
Came to the estate. ”

“ The house stood--if anything so old and feeble could be said to stand--on a piece of waste ground, blighted with the unwholesome smoke of factory chimneys, and echoing the clank of iron wheels and rush of troubled water. ”

“ This too is the character of the house. It is not large, not overburdened with gables, not ornamented, not what is called striking, in any way, but simply an old English house, genuine and true. The warm sunlight falls on the old red tiles, the dark beams look the darker for the glow of light, the shapely cone of the hop-oust rises at the end; there are swallows and flowers and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, [17] like the words of an old ballad ... why even a tall chanticleer makes a home look homely. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nearly all historic houses are what the agents always 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. ”

“ Still others, well preserved and freshly painted, surrounded by the well kept lawns and posy beds of our grandmothers' time, are survivals of a glorious past. [Pg 2]
Old houses are like old romances; both are filled with mystery. Could they but speak, what fascinating tales they would reveal. They carry us back in imagination to one of the most eventful periods of our country's life—that of its struggle for freedom—and they inspire us with a desire to weave them into stories that will give authentic glimpses of the days when our country was young. ”

“ In a spacious chamber of a great, gloomy mansion, an old man sat alone, his gray head bowed upon his trembling hands, which rested upon a cane. A few blocks away the hum and traffic of the Crescent City filled the air; but here all was still and quiet. An up-town mansion, embowered in huge live-oaks—a shady, silent place, the sight of which made one feel gloomy, and caused a slight chill to pass involuntarily over the frame. The great house looked like an enchanted palace, with old Bernard Dane the presiding genii, all alone and lonely like the last leaf upon the tree. ”

“ Fare you well, old house! you're naught that can feel or see,
But you seem like a human being—a dear old friend to me;
And we never will have a better home, if my opinion stands,
Until we commence a-keepin' house in the house not made with hands. ”

“ Now I think there is nothing about a house in which a contrast is greater between old and new than this piece of architecture. The old, either delightful in its comfortable simplicity, or decorated with the noblest and most meaning art in the place ”

“ The first object that interested us was a gentleman's house upon a green plain or holm, almost close to the Clyde, sheltered by tall trees, a quiet modest mansion, and, though white-washed, being an old building, and no other house near it, or in connexion with it, and standing upon the level field, which belonged to it, its own domain, the whole scene together brought to our minds an image of the retiredness and sober elegance of a nunnery ”