American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the
Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the
Pantheon at Rome. From the rotunda, at either side, starts a
white-columned arcade connecting the various houses which are
distributed at graceful intervals along the margins of the rectangular
lawn, above which loom the tops of even rows of beautiful old trees.
Flanking the buildings of the lawn, and reached by brick walks which
pass between the famous serpentine walls (walls but one brick thick
which support themselves on the snake-fence principle, by progressing in
a series of reverse curves), are the "ranges": solid rows of one-story
student dormitories built of brick and fronted by colonnades which
command other lawns and other trees.
With a single exception, restorations and additions to the university
have been made with reverence and taste, and the Brooks Museum, the one
architectural horror of the place, fortunately does not stand upon the
lawn. Since it is said that beauty could not exist were there not
ugliness for contrast, this building may have its uses; certainly, after
a glance at it, one looks back with renewed delight at the structures of
the central group.
Most superb of all, always there hangs at night, above the buildings and
the tree-tops, a glorious full moon. At least I suppose it always hangs
there, for though it seemed to us very wonderful, every one else seemed
used to it.
Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by
moonlight. There could not have been a finer moonlit night, I thought,
than that cold, crisp one upon which my companion stood for two hours
beside the rotunda, gazing at the lawn and drawing it, its frosty grass
and trees decked with diamonds, its white columns standing out softly
from their shadow backgrounds like phosphorescent ghosts in the luminous
blue darkness. Until I was nearly frozen I stayed there with him. That
drawing cost him one of the worst colds he ever had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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