It would seem that there could be no country in the world where buildings of the noblest kind would be more desired than in America, for there is none in which they are so much needed. But such is not the case. As men who have lived long in darkness become so accustomed to the want of light as not to feel its absence, so the absoluteness of the want of fine buildings in America prevents that want from being generally felt. Heirs of the intellectual wealth of the past, we have no inheritance of the great works of its hands. No material heirlooms have been transmitted to us. We are cut off from any share in the monuments on which the labor, the affection, and the possessions of former generations were expended. The precious and enlarging associations connected with such works, which bind successive generations of men together with ties of memory and reverence, stimulating the imagination to new conceptions, and nerving the will to large efforts, have nothing to cling to here. The land is barren and naked; and, moreover, no effort is made to relieve the future from the want which the present feels so keenly. With wealth ample enough for undertakings of any magnitude,--with intelligence, more boasted than real, but still sufficient for the conception of improvement, we exhibit in our civilization neither the taste nor the capacity for any noble works of Art. The value of beauty is disregarded, and the cultivation of the sense of beauty is treated as of little worth, compared with the culture of what are styled the practical faculties. Our wealth is spent in the erection of extravagant stores and shops,--in the decoration of oyster-saloons, hotels, and steamboats,--in the lavish and selfish adornment of drawing-rooms and chambers. In the whole breadth of the continent there is not a single building of such beauty as to be an object of national pride, and few which will have any value in future times, except as historic records of the poverty of sentiment and the deficiency of character of the men of this generation.
Our oldest and best endowed University has, like Oxford, lately engaged in the erection of a Museum, which, though more limited in its general object, has yet a scope of such large and generous proportion as to make it a work of even more than national interest. It is undertaken on such a scale as to fit it not merely for present needs, but for the increasing wants of later times. The State has contributed to it from the public treasury, and private citizens have given their contributions liberally towards its support. The building has been rapidly carried forward, and the portion undertaken is now near completion. How does it compare with the Oxford Museum? What provision has been made that in its outward aspect it shall correspond with the worth and grandeur of the collections it is to hold and the studies that are to be carried on within it? What patient thought, what stores of imagination, what happy adaptations do its walls reveal? These questions are easily answered. Convenience of internal arrangement has been sought without regard to external beauty, without consideration of the claims of Art. The architect has, we must suppose, been obliged to conform his plans to the most frugal estimates; but we cannot help thinking, that, generous as the State has been, it would have been more worthy of her, had no such necessity existed. The building for the Museum is one which can never excite high admiration, never touch any chord of poetic sentiment, never arouse in the student within its walls any feeling save that of mere convenience and utility. Its bare, shadowless walls, unadorned by carven columns or memorial statues, will stand incapable of affording support for those associations which endear every human work of worth, covering it with praise and remembrance, as the ivy clings to the stone, adding beauty to beauty,--associations which make men proud of their ancestors and desirous to equal them in achievement The University at Cambridge, just entering on the second quarter of its third century, has not a single building that is beautiful, perhaps we might say none that is not positively ugly; and we almost despair of a future when our people shall become enlightened and magnanimous enough to appreciate noble architecture at its true worth, as the expression of the greatness of national character, as an enduring record of faith and of truth, and as an essential instrument in any system of education that professes to be complete.