Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and eyes, of Nortlicrn Franco; the blnckenod timbers, crossed and carved into every conceivable waywardness of imagination, of Normandy and old England; the rudo hewing of tLa pine timbers of the Swiss cottage; the projecting turrets and bracketed oriels of the German street; these, and a thousand other forms, not in themselves reaching any high degree. of excellence, are yet admirable, and most precious, as tb fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds. It is easier to take away the energy, than to add the cultivation; and the quly effect .of the better knowledge which civilized nations now possess, has been, as we have seen in a former chapter, to forbid their being happy, without enabling them to be great xxxv. It is very necessary, however, with respect to this provincial or rustic architecture, that we should Carefully distinguish lie truly grotesque from ita picturesque elements. In the
Seven Lamps
I defined the picturesque to bo
parasitical sublimity, or sublimity belonging to the external or accidental characters of a thing, not to the thing itself. For instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with fragments of shale instead of elates, it becomes picturesque, because the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and their grey and gloomy color, give to it something of the Bavageuess, and much of the general aspect, of the slope of a mountain side. But as a mere cottage roof, it cannot be sublime, and whatever sublimity it derives from the wildness or sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering, is, so far forth, parasitical. The mountain itself would have been grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the cottage cannot be grand as such, and the parasitical grandeur which it may possess by accidental qualities, is …
