Town wall

“ My room would have made an ideal study for a lazy man, I thought, the two windows facing straight into a sand-bank, above which rose a steep hill, or perhaps I should rather say the steep wall of a plateau, on whose treeless top, all by themselves, or with only a graveyard for company, stood the Town Hall and the two village churches. ”

“ There are certainly many more houses out of the town than in it, and they all stand apart, yet near, hiding in their own shrubberies, or behind the green rows of elms which wall in the secluded lanes on either side. ”

“ The bust, of which we give a representation, is placed in a niche in the outside wall of the house in which Robert Brown was born, and the Town Council has undertaken that, in the event of this house being pulled down in the course of municipal improvements, the bust will find a place in the wall of the new Town Hall which it is proposed to erect on the spot. ”

“ The wall, with the towers, completely obscures the buildings which form the town, and serve as a guard against any depredations of enemies, while it shelters the inhabitants from the effects of their arrows or musquetry. ”

“ We must take care that all buildings are well lighted, but this is obviously an easier matter with those which are on country estates, because there can be no neighbour's wall to interfere, whereas in town high party walls or limited space obstruct the light and make them dark. ”

“ The Great Wall runs along the ridge of hills in a direction nearly east and west; where it crosses the town it is kept in good repair, but elsewhere it is very much in ruins, and could offer little resistance to an enemy. ”

“ It has lost a course of facing-stones since Hutton saw it, and the apple tree is but the shadow of what it was.
The turnpike road, which usually runs upon the site of the Wall, uniformly swerves to the right when passing a village. The truth is, nearly every house and hamlet in the district has sprung out of the Wall. In many instances a mile-castle, slightly added to, has formed a mediæval dwelling of some strength. ”

“ Sometimes it is a wall that flanks a stretch of the commonplace thoroughfares; sometimes a gate or a portal under a tower giving into the college quadrangle from which you pass by inner ways beneath inner walls to an inmost garden, where the creepers cling to the windows and the porches, or a space of ivied masonry suns itself above the odorous bushes and the daisied sward. It would be hard to choose among these homes of ancient lore; but happily one is not obliged to choose. They are all there for the looking, and one owns them, an inalienable possession for life. ”

“ Street upon street of houses, white stucco or red brick, adorned with pilaster and pediment and cornice, covered with tall pantiled roofs; many bearing the dates of their birth-years two or three centuries ago; these give the capital an old-world, most attractive look, a picturesqueness that is sternly denied to most so modern towns. Steeples of character to match, frequently tower above the roofs, while very constant parks and squares, long avenues of broad-leafed trees and cool-looking fountains, some of them real works of art, do much to make this town a very delightful place. ”

“ All these boroughs where you were born, and hope to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient magnificence,—Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea, Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry. ”

“ The city lives in the past still, and on its memories, keeping its old walls and moat entire, and nearly fourscore wall-towers, in stern array. But grass grows in the moat, fruit trees thrive there, and vines clamber on the walls. One wanders about in the queer streets with the feeling of being transported back to the Middle Ages ”

“ Therefore when I reached the border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. ”

“ Few of the streets, except the bazaars, can be called in any sense thoroughfares. They wind and twist about most irregularly, sometimes open to the sky, sometimes covered in by rooms belonging to the adjoining houses, and they usually [54] end abruptly at the closed door of a house or garden. When one or more rooms are built over the street the builder rarely trusts to the strength of the original wall: he fixes wooden uprights on each side to support the cross beams. Dirtiness and want of ventilation are conspicuous. ”

“ A visit there is like a leap back into the Middle Ages. Every street is a varied and interesting composition. No two houses are alike. They were built by the citizens to really pass their lives in. The town is strongly placed upon the crest of a hill, with a river at its foot, and well fortified and protected by massive encircling walls and towers and deep gates, which give it so strong and picturesque a character, while the timber and tile-roofed gallery for the warders still exists along the inside of the walls. ”

“ Just think of a solid stone wall as high as a house and more than half as thick at its base! It narrows down to two or three feet in thickness at its top, like a pyramid of masonry, and above this will be a railing to prevent people from falling off, for there is to be a sidewalk along the outer edge of the driveway here. ”

“ There is an embattled wall, which makes a terrace walk, above the fair lawns and jewelled flower beds, and from the top as you walk, the hills girdling the old city go waving in gradations of blue to an opal horizon. ”

“ The exterior of a private house gives no idea of its interior. Sometimes its plain mud-wall has a solid handsome street-door, and if it is very old, perhaps a rich Saracenic portal; but usually you slip from the gutter, lined with mud-walls, called a street, into an alley, crooked, probably dirty, pass through a stable-yard and enter a small court, which may be cheered by a tree and a basin of water. Thence you wind through a narrow passage into a large court, a parallelogram of tesselated marble, having a fountain in the centre and about it orange and lemon trees, and roses and vines. ”

“ As we pass through the city we notice numerous edifices substantially built of brick, the residences of native merchants, temples with a sculptured granite façade, and a large customs station; but the houses in the suburbs which border the creek are raised above the water, on piles, and their temporary, miserable appearance is in striking contrast to the abodes and evidences of wealth which we encounter in the heart of the town. ”

“ It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven. ”

“ After threading our way for at least two miles through a succession of narrow streets, we at length emerged into the open space, where we obtained a full view of the city walls, and from the summit of a small hill which was situated near them, a tolerably extensive one over the town itself. The city walls are about sixty feet high, and, for the most part, so overgrown with grass, creeping plants, and underwood, that they resemble a magnificent mass of living vegetation. ”

“ The suburbs manifested a decided increase in the number of buildings and population, and the inhabitants seemed more busy and prosperous than ever, as a proof of which we remarked a new bazaar, built two years ago, twelve hundred feet long and five hundred broad. The beauty of the environs, as viewed from the angle towers of the city wall, seemed as striking as when first beheld, and was enhanced by the lake-like waters of the broad moat which now surrounds the walls of the city. ”

“ Street consists of two rows of aged, one-story hovels, squeezed closely one against the other, with leaning walls and windows all awry; the hole-ridden roofs of these human habitations, thus crippled by time, are mottled with patches of the inner bark of the linden-tree, and overgrown with moss; above them, here and there, project tall poles surmounted by starling-houses, and they are shaded by the dusty verdure of elderberry bushes and crooked willows, the scanty flora of the town suburbs inhabited by poverty. ”

“ If you take a country walk anywhere in Normandy you find that the gardens of the country houses have massive gates and high walls, the front door is like a portcullis, and the window shutters are barricades. The smallest cottages have great doors and window shutters, and if there is a garden, it is two to one that the wall is a real wall. ”

“ This is a sweet pretty place, the houses flat-roofed, and painted white or some bright colour, and the streets prodigiously regular and crossing one another at right angles with the most surprising neatness, and in the middle of the town a fine handsome square. Along each street are planted rows of trees, vastly symmetrical, and beside them are water-courses or small canals fed from springs, which are very agreeable for their coolness. ”

“ The grim old building which, when it was new, gave its name to the town, is one for which no search needs to be made; its blackened and time worn walls are seen from the train windows by every traveller who enters the city from the south. ”

“ Mixed up with dwellings, notable by their contrariness and their obvious revolt against all that is conventional in the shape and arrangements of a house, are portions of old ramparts, a ruined sentry tower and a gate that has got astray from its connections. There is a church too that is apparently out of drawing, that has a lane burrowing under its tower and that has become wedged in among bits of a town on a precarious slope. ”

“ The wall is of superbly solid and intensely "toned" brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with goodly trees and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and little open gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of a splendid dignity. ”

“ At right angles to the main street or streets, run narrow alleys, upon which open the yards or courts in which the houses are situated. Even the buildings which happen to stand contiguous to the main street offer nothing to the gaze but an expanse of dead wall. ”

“ These pleasure gardens are bordered on the north by a section of the Forbidden City wall, and our picture shows one of the majestic comer towers-its multiple roof of Imperial yellow glaze overshadowing a comer of the park As usual, the wall is sur counded by a broad moat, which in the summer time is completely covered by a luxuriant growth of magnificent lotus. ”

“ Even the great plate-glass windows lined within and without by comfortable chairs commanding, as they did, the principal public square or park and all the fascinating forces of so vigorous and young a town, were such as would naturally be occupied by the bloods and sports of the village, the traveling salesmen, and the idling big-wigs of political and other realms. ”

“ Its "stone walls do not a prison make," since they do not shut you out from rural sights and sounds: walking in almost any street, even in the lowest part, in the busiest, noisiest centre of the town, you have but to lift your eyes to see a green hill not far away ”

“ Assemble four or five hundred frame and brick houses of slightly varying size and architecture and roominess, surround them with trees and pleasing grass plots, provide the town a main street and one cross street of stores, place one or two red brick school houses at varying points in them, add one white sandstone courthouse in a public square, and a railroad station, and four or five or six red brick churches, and there you have them all. Give one town a lake, another a stream, another a mill pond—it makes little difference. ”

“ The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. ”

“ The next "open country" is protected from public trespass by the Garden Wall, which appears to have been well built in the long ago by masons properly trained in their craft, and extends, at a uniform height, to the Fallen Flats, where the floor is covered with slabs of enormous size that have fallen from the ceiling since water occupation ceased, as is clearly shown by the sharp edges and surfaces entirely unworn. ”

“ This name is given by the inhabitants of the neighborhood to the old Roman wall separating England from Scotland, because they suppose that from the strength of the cement and the durability of the stone, the devil must have built it. The superstitious peasantry are said to be in the habit of gathering up the fragments of this wall to put in the foundation of their own tenements, to insure an equal solidity. ”

“ Whenever there is a river or stream available for such purposes, and the surrounding country is fertile, the village rapidly rises to be a considerable town. Frame-houses are so quickly erected, and the materials are so easily procured near a saw-mill, that, in the first instance, no other description of houses is to be found in our incipient towns. But as the town increases, brick and stone houses rapidly supplant these less substantial edifices, which seldom remain good for more than thirty or forty years. ”