No More Learning

Its harsh and unsteady
light offends. No one having both brains and eyes will use it. A mild,
or what artists term a cool light, with its consequent warm shadows,
will do wonders for even an ill-furnished apartment. Never was a more
lovely thought than that of the astral lamp. We mean, of course,
the astral lamp proper--the lamp of Argand, with its original plain
ground-glass shade, and its tempered and uniform moonlight rays. The
cut-glass shade is a weak invention of the enemy. The eagerness with
which we have adopted it, partly on account of its _flashiness,_ but
principally on account of its _greater rest,_ is a good commentary on
the proposition with which we began. It is not too much to say, that the
deliberate employer of a cut-glass shade, is either radically deficient
in taste, or blindly subservient to the caprices of fashion. The light
proceeding from one of these gaudy abominations is unequal broken, and
painful. It alone is sufficient to mar a world of good effect in the
furniture subjected to its influence. Female loveliness, in especial, is
more than one-half disenchanted beneath its evil eye.

In the matter of glass, generally, we proceed upon false principles. Its
leading feature is _glitter--_and in that one word how much of all that
is detestable do we express! Flickering, unquiet lights, are _sometimes
_pleasing--to children and idiots always so--but in the embellishment
of a room they should be scrupulously avoided. In truth, even strong
_steady _lights are inadmissible.
The huge and unmeaning glass
chandeliers, prism-cut, gas-lighted, and without shade, which dangle in
our most fashionable drawing-rooms, may be cited as the quintessence of
all that is false in taste or preposterous in folly.

The rage for _glitter-_because its idea has become as we before
observed, confounded with that of magnificence in the abstract--has
led us, also, to the exaggerated employment of mirrors. We line our
dwellings with great British plates, and then imagine we have done a
fine thing. Now the slightest thought will be sufficient to convince
any one who has an eye at all, of the ill effect of numerous
looking-glasses, and especially of large ones. Regarded apart from
its reflection, the mirror presents a continuous, flat, colourless,
unrelieved surface,--a thing always and obviously unpleasant. Considered
as a reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious
uniformity: and the evil is here aggravated, not in merely direct
proportion with the augmentation of its sources, but in a ratio
constantly increasing. In fact, a room with four or five mirrors
arranged at random, is, for all purposes of artistic show, a room of
no shape at all. If we add to this evil, the attendant glitter upon
glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing
effects. The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bedizzened,
would be instantly aware of something wrong, although he might be
altogether unable to assign a cause for his dissatisfaction. But let
the same person be led into a room tastefully furnished, and he would be
startled into an exclamation of pleasure and surprise.

It is an evil growing out of our republican institutions, that here a
man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in
it. The corruption of taste is a portion or a pendant of the
dollar-manufacture. As we grow rich, our ideas grow rusty. It is,
therefore, not among _our _aristocracy that we must look (if at all, in
Appallachia), for the spirituality of a British _boudoir. _But we have
seen apartments in the tenure of Americans of moderns [possibly "modest"
or "moderate"] means, which, in negative merit at least, might vie with
any of the _or-molu'd _cabinets of our friends across the water. Even
_now_, there is present to our mind's eye a small and not, ostentatious
chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found.