would be less novel in style, and so two difficulties would be
overcome. For novelty of style is a drawback to effect, as tending
to isolate the house; and a new house is always at a disadvantage.
Nature, in any case, is slow to adopt our handiwork into the
landscape; sometimes the assimilation is so difficult that it must
be ruined for its original purpose before it will be accepted.
Sooner or later, indeed, it will be accepted. For though most of our
buildings seem even in decay to resist the harmonizing hand of Nature,
and to grow only ghastly and not venerable in dilapidation, yet
leave them long enough and what of beauty was possible to them will
appear, though it be only a crumbling heap of bricks where the
chimney stood, or the grassy slope where the cellar-wall has fallen
in.

It is for this reason that persons of taste have taken pains to face
their houses with weather-stained and lichen-crusted stone, or
invent proper names for them, in imitation of the English
manor-houses. But Nature is jealous of this helping, and neither the
lichens nor the names will stick, for the reason that they never
grew there. They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their
conditions. The gray ancestral houses of England are the beautiful
symbols of the permanence of family and of caste. They are the
embodiments of traditional institutions and culture. When we speak
of the House of Stanley or of Howard, the expression is not wholly
figurative. We do not mean simply the men and women of these families,
but the whole complex of this manifold environment which has
descended to them and in the midst of which they have grown up,--no
more to be separated from it than the polyp from the coral stem.
All this is centralized and has its expression in the House.