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Dresser once wrote: "Any words that I can use must fail to convey any adequate idea of the consciousness of the work, the loveliness of the compositions, the harmoniousness of the colors, and the beauty of the surroundings here before me; and yet the adjectives which I have tried to heap one upon another, in the hope of conveying to the reader what I an architect and ornamentist feel when contemplating these matchless shrines, must appear, I am afraid, altogether unreasonable."
The Assyrian carver doubtless took his designs from the carpets in the adjoining chambers. Sill of a door, from Khorsabad. Louvre. Length 40 inches. A good idea of these designs may be formed from the slab figured below. The centre is occupied by a number of interlacing circles, betraying no little skill on the part of the ornamentist.
This result they obtained in one of two ways; they either cased their walls in stone, an expensive and laborious process, or they covered them with a decoration of many colours. As soon as stone came into use, it must have offered an irresistible temptation to the chisel of the sculptor and the ornamentist; and so we nearly always find it decorated with carvings.
In Assyria as in Chaldæa the dark and hard volcanic rocks have only been found in a few isolated fragments. They were used by the statuary and ornamentist rather than by the architect, and we cannot say for certain where they got them. We know, however, that basalt and other rocks of that kind were found in the upper valleys of the streams that flowed into the two great rivers.
And yet when we bring these scanty vestiges together we find that enough is left to give the taste and invention of the Assyrian ornamentist a very high place in our respect. That artist was richly endowed with the power of inventing happy combinations of lines, and of varying his motives without losing sight for an instant of his original theme.
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