Page:The Poetry of Architecture.djvu/235

Rh excellent rock, and has a fine surface, but it is unmanageable. The greyer granites may often be used with good effect, as well as the coarse porphyries, when the grey is to be particularly warm. An outward surface of a loose block may be often turned to good account in turning an angle, as the colours which it has contracted by its natural exposure will remain on it without inducing damp. It is always to be remembered, that he who prefers neatness to beauty, and who would have sharp angles, and clean surfaces, in preference to curved outlines and lichenous colour, has no business to live among hills.

Such, then, are the principal points to be kept in view in the edifice itself. Of the mode of uniting it with the near features of foliage and ground, it would be utterly useless to speak: it is a question of infinite variety, and involving the whole theory of composition, so that it would take up volumes to develope principles sufficient to guide us to the result which the feeling of the practised eye would arrive at in a moment. The inequalities of the ground, the character and colour of those inequalities, the nature of the air, the exposure, and the consequent fall of the light, the quantity and form of near and distant foliage, all have their effect on the design, and should have their influence on the designer, inducing, as they do, a perfect change of circumstance in every locality. Only one general rule can be given, and that we repeat. The house must NOT be a noun substantive, it must not stand by itself, it must be part and parcel of a proportioned