Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/553

Rh that gave us Girard College and the Mint and Fairmount Water-Works—stands low among the clustered towers, just as many a town in the Alps or Apennines lies low in the cup of the hills, and is the lovelier for it; they redeem from ugliness buildings of later periods, as where they give the scale in the most surprising fashion to the Union League; from far up or down the long straight line of Broad Street they complete the perspective as impressively as the Arc de Triomphe completes that other impressive perspective from the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris. They are as beautiful when you see them from the bridges or from the Park, a great group of towers high above the houses, high above the lesser towers and spires, high above the curls and wisps of smoke that now hang over Philadelphia; and from the near country they give to the low-lying town a sky-line that for loveliness and grandeur is not to be surpassed by the famous first view of Pisa across the Italian plain.

Philadelphia is, in truth, such a beautiful town that I am surprised the world should be so slow in finding it out. The danger to it now is the Philadelphian's determination to thrust beauty upon it at any cost, not knowing that it is beautiful already. There is too much talk everywhere about town-planning as a reform, as a part of the whole tiresome business of elevating the masses. As I have said, Penn talked no nonsense of that kind, nor did Sir Christopher Wren when he made the fine design that London had not the sense to stick to, nor L'Enfant when he laid