For every picture here that slept, A living canvas is unrolled; The silent harp he might have swept Leans to his touch its strings of gold. Believe, dear Friends, they murmur still Some sweet accord to those you play, That happier winds of Eden thrill With echoes of the earthly lay; That he, for every triumph won, Whereto your poet-souls aspire, Sees opening, in that perfect sun, Another blossom's bud of fire! Each song, of Love and Sorrow born, Another flower to crown your boy,-- Each shadow here his ray of morn, Till Grief shall clasp the hand of Joy! HOUSE-BUILDING. Because our architecture is bad, and because the architecture of our forefathers in the Middle Ages was good, Mr. Ruskin and others seem to think there is no salvation for us until we build in the same spirit as they did. But that we should do so no more follows than that we should envy those geological ages when the club-mosses were of the size of forest-trees, and the frogs as big as oxen. There are many advantages to be had in the forests of the Amazon and the interior of Borneo,--inexhaustible fertility, endless water-power,--but no one thinks of going there to live. No age is without its attractions. There would be much to envy in the Greek or the Roman life, if we could have them clear of drawbacks. Many persons would be glad always to find Emerson in State Street, or sauntering in the Mall, ready to talk with all comers,--or to hear the latest words of Bancroft or Lowell from their own lips at the cattle-show or the militia-muster. The Roman villas had some excellent features,--the peristyle of statues, the cryptoporticus with its midnight coolness and shade of a July noon, the mosaic floor, and the glimmering frescoes of the ceiling. But we are content to get our poets and historians in their books, and to take the pine-grove for our noonday walk, or to wait till night has transformed the street into a cryptoporticus nobler than Titus's. It is as history that these things charm us; but the charm vanishes, when, even in fancy, we bring them into contact with our actual lives. So it is with the medieval architecture. It is true, in studying these wonderful fossils, a regret for our present poverty, and a desire to appropriate something from the ancient riches, will at times come over us. But this feeling, if it be more than slight and transient, if it seriously influence our conduct, is somewhat factitious or somewhat morbid. Let us be a little disinterested in our admiration, and not, like children, cry for all we see. We have our share: let us leave the dead theirs.