I. ARCHITECTURE 33

and latticed window.¹ Has it ever occurred to you to ask the question, what effect the cottage would have upon your feelings if it had no roof? no visible roof, I mean;-if instead of the thatched slope, in which the little upper windows are buried deep, as in a nest of straw-or the rough shelter of its mountain shales-or warm colouring of russet tiles-there were nothing but a flat leaden top to it, making it look like a large packing-case with windows in it? I don’t think the rarity of such a sight would make you feel it to be beautiful; on the contrary, if you think over the matter, you will find that you actually do owe, and ought to owe, a great part of your pleasure in all cottage scenery, and in all the inexhaustible imagery of literature which is founded upon it, to the conspicuousness of the cottage roof-to the subordination of the cottage itself to its covering, which leaves, in nine cases out of ten, really more roof than anything else. It is, indeed, not so much the whitewashed walls-nor the flowery garden-nor the rude fragments of stones set for steps at the door-nor any other picturesqueness of the building which interest you, so much as the grey bank of its heavy eaves, deepcushioned with green moss and golden stonecrop. And there is a profound, yet evident, reason for this feeling. The very soul of the cottage-the essence and meaning of it-are in its roof; it is that, mainly, wherein consists its shelter; that, wherein it differs most completely from a cleft in rocks or bower in woods. It is in its thick impenetrable coverlid of close thatch that its whole heart and hospitality are concentrated. Consider the difference, in sound, of the expressions “beneath my roof” and “within my walls,”-consider whether you would be best sheltered, in a shed, with a stout roof sustained on corner posts, or in an enclosure of four walls without a roof at all,-and you will quickly see how important a part of the cottage the roof must always be to the mind as well as to the

¹[Compare Ruskin’s early essay, The Poetry of Architecture, § 12, Vol. I. p. 12.]

XII. C

[Version 0.04: March 2008]