Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/307

Rh Penn had left the building and growth of Philadelphia to chance as the founders of other American towns did—they would rather boast with New York or Boston of the disorderly picturesqueness of streets that follow old cow tracks made before the town was. But Penn understood the value of order in architecture as in conduct. It is true that Ruskin, the accepted prophet of my young days, did not include order among his Seven Lamps, but there was a good deal Ruskin did not know about architecture, and a town like Paris in its respect for arrangement—for order—for a thought-out plan—will teach more at a glance than all his rhapsodies. Philadelphia has not the noble perspectives of the French capital nor the splendid buildings to complete them, but its despised regularity gives it the repose, the serenity, which is an essential of great art, whether the art of the painter or the engraver, the sculptor or the architect. And it gives, too, a suggestiveness, a mystery we are more apt to seek in architectural disorder and caprice. I know nobody who has pointed out this beauty in Penn's design except Mrs. Gilchrist in the description from which I have already borrowed, and she merely hints at the truth, not grasping it. Philadelphia to her was more picturesque and more foreign-looking than she expected, and her explanation is in the "long straight streets at right angles to each other, long enough and broad enough to present that always pleasing effect of vista-converging lines that stretch out indefinitely and look as if they must certainly lead somewhere very