Alone
To Isadore
The Village Street
The Forest Reverie
Notes




PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE.

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of
their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little
sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, _meliora probant,
deteriora _sequuntur - the people are too much a race of gadabouts to
maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a
delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The
Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy.
The Scotch are _poor _decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate
idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are _all _curtains - a
nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and
Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous.

How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy
of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable
thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the _display of
wealth _has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic
display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and
which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge