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Updated: May 8, 2025
Another cottage feature: the walls were literally clothed with verdure and color; in front, huge creeping geraniums, jasmine, and Virginia creepers hid the brick-work; and the western walls, to use the words of a greater painter than ourselves, were "Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine."
Upon the broken tombs and altars the light from the setting sun falls with warm cheerful radiance, flushing stone and brick-work with a ruddy glow like jasper; whilst, high in the heavens above the cypress tops, the crescent moon prepares to turn to gold from silver.
Next come compact masses of Vauban brick, ripe and ruddy, of beautiful, smooth workmanship; stately military gateways and drawbridges, with a patch of red trousering a soldier on his fat Normandy 'punch' ambling lazily over; and the peaceful cart with its Flemish horses. The brick-work is sliced through, as with a cheese-knife, to admit the railway, giving a complete section of the work.
He descended into the chasm of the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his passage through.
And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a frigidarium where five hundred people could swim together; a tepidarium and a calidarium* on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared.
Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it.
Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brick-work, now lost amid the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the reptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human forms.
The whole fabric was then covered by a smooth light flooring of planks and brick-work, upon which was a pile of wood: This was to be lighted at the proper time, in order that the two vessels might present the appearance of simple fire- ships, intended only to excite a conflagration of the bridge.
That's difficult for me to understand, however enlightened I may be with sun, moon, stearine, train oil, and tallow. My old wood-work and my old brick-work will rise again from the dust!
Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name.
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