Pictured Windows

Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial city,
crowning the high summit of a hill with its cathedral, its many
churches, and public edifices, all of Gothic architecture. With no more
level ground than a single piazza in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside, through arched
passages and by steps of stone. The aspect of everything was awfully
old; older, indeed, in its effect on the imagination than Rome itself,
because history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices and
tell us all about their origin. Etruscan princes may have dwelt in them.
A thousand years, at all events, would seem but a middle age for these
structures. They are built of such huge, square stones, that their
appearance of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with the idea
that they can never fall,--never crumble away,--never be less fit than
now for human habitation. Many of them may once have been palaces, and
still retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize how
undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of our brief lifetime out of
permanent materials, and with a view to their being occupied by future
'generations.

All towns should be made capable of purification by fire, or of decay,
within each half-century. Otherwise, they become the hereditary haunts
of vermin and noisomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility
of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of
man's contrivances and accommodations. It is beautiful, no doubt, and
exceedingly satisfactory to some of our natural instincts, to imagine
our far posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or
their children do, a misfortune analogous to that of the Sibyl, when
she obtained the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build almost
immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing
old, musty, unwholesome, dreary,--full of death scents, ghosts, and
murder stains; in short, such habitations as one sees everywhere in
Italy, be they hovels or palaces.