LINCOLN, _June_ 22
At Miss Brown's, Castle Garden.
Mr. Copley _has_ done something in the world; I was sure that he had. He
has a little income of his own, but he is too proud and ambitious to be
an idler. He looked so manly when he talked about it, standing up
straight and strong in his knickerbockers. I like men in knickerbockers.
Aunt Celia doesn't. She says she doesn't see how a well-brought-up
Copley can go about with his legs in that condition. I would give worlds
to know how aunt Celia ever unbent sufficiently to get engaged. But, as
I was saying, Mr. Copley has accomplished something, young as he is. He
has built three picturesque suburban churches suitable for weddings, and
a state lunatic asylum.
Aunt Celia says we shall have no worthy architecture until every building
is made an exquisitely sincere representation of its deepest purpose,--a
symbol, as it were, of its indwelling meaning. I should think it would
be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn't
dare say so, as Mr. Copley seemed to think it all right. Their
conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of
architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am
studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I'm
going to quote them some time offhand, just after morning service, when
we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: "The
Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable
demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal
flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial
proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty." Then when he has
recovered from the shock of this, here is my second: "Nor can any lover
of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without
feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his
chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of
flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce."
Memoranda: _Lincoln choir is an example of Early English or First
Pointed_, _which can generally be told from something else by bold
projecting buttresses and dog-tooth moulding round the abacusses_. (The
plural is my own, and it does not look right.) _Lincoln Castle was the
scene of many prolonged sieges_, _and was once taken by Oliver Cromwell_.