The City Parlor

       And he will tell you that in lesser matters the city, always in advance, has reached elegance and an inhabited appearance much earlier than the country at large, and drawing-rooms were darkened there the first and crowded with plenishing, and there were paintings and statuary in them before these objects traveled farther, and there were portieres and screens and placqucs and brass-work and bronze and old silver and china and beveled glass and needle painting, dark walls and multiplied mantels shelf over shelf, short curtains and long curtains, huge vases and little panels and the rest. And all this while the rural parlor was ornamented only with the framed sampler, and the family-tree, and the lady with the big handkerchief at the tomb under weeping willows, with at best four prints in gilt frames or possibly a couple of crude portraits or black silhouettes, always excepting, of course, those colonial mansions that rejoiced in "Smyberts" and ''Copleys." Surely the city parlor had the right of it. The moral forces are not necessarily strengthened by contact with bare and uninviting walls; the nature, instead of being developed to better things, will be constantly returned upon itself, in the absence of objects stimulating the fancy and leading the thought outward. And certainly the intellectual forces in almost every such instance are starved, and where one is of such build that he chances to be improved by the concentration of thought that such ascetic dwellings might foster, others are only dwarfed and withered.

       The age that has become famous for its unhealthy self-introspection could hardly do a better thing than make the surrounding material walls of its daily life diverting and interesting, while all that hangs upon them or lies between them leads the thought out to larger life and experience, to the past history of art, to its future hopes, and to its effect upon humanity; and if the harmony of all, the lovely and luxurious combination, excite the pleasure-loving senses, the controlling brain also is excited in memory, imagination, invention, and appreciation. One realizes the falsehood of that old, strict idea that one could not be good and be comfortable, understands that enjoyment of fine colors and fine contours does not belong exclusively to the Scarlet Lady, and that beauty and brimstone are really not inseparable.