Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878 — John Shaqi
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
water is made a mere accessory to a series of stone steps, jars
and monsters. Steps are made to walk upon, jars to hold water. An
interminable series of either with water poured over them is not the
work of a genius. If the first suggestion to the mind be that a thing
is a stairway, the fact that it is made too wet to walk upon does not
constitute it a beautiful cascade. A row of jars on pedestals around a
grass-plat has a pretty effect, because they do or may hold flowers,
but to set several rows of them on a hillside and turn on the water is
not art. As an admirable illustration of fantasy well wrought out the
Fountain of Latona at Versailles may be cited. There Latona, having
appealed to Jupiter against the inhabitants of Argos, who had deprived
her of water, is deluged by jets from the unfortunates, who appear in
various degrees of transformation into frogs.
[Illustration: THE ENGLISH QUARTER, ON INTERNATIONAL AVENUE.]
The cascade of the Trocadero has nothing meretricious about it. It is,
like the building of which it is the finest ornament, of Jura marble,
while much of the adjacent work is of artificial stone so admirably
made that one cannot tell the difference, and is disposed to give the
preference to the latter as evincing greater ingenuity than the mere
patient chiselling of the quarry-stone. The pools are symmetrical, in
conformity to the style of their surroundings, their overflows curved,
the successive falls being about two feet after the first dash nine
hundred and twenty feet from the balcony level. Each side of the
cascade is flanked by six small pools in which are spouting and spray
jets. The course ends in a pool which may be described as square, with
circular bays on three of its sides. In this are one large jet and two
smaller ones, which are themselves beautiful and keep the surface in
a pleasant ripple. The corner pillars are crowned by colossal gilt
figures of animals, supposed to represent what we were used to call
the "four quarters of the earth"--Europe, Asia, Africa and America, as
the books had it before America had attained any prominence in public
estimation. These are typified by a horse, an elephant, a rhinoceros
and a bull, the latter probably a tribute to our bison, but not much
like him. These face the four winds, so to speak, and do indeed more
nearly, as they are set obliquely, than do the grounds and buildings,
the length of which runs north-west and south-east. Each animal has
his back to the pool, and with one exception is in a rampant attitude.
Many thousands of cubic metres of stone were quarried away to afford a
site for the cascade, for the system of water-pipes which supply the
various pools and jets and conduct off the surplus. The size of the
site occupied by these hydraulic works is 360 by 75 feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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