That afternoon and evening I strolled about the summer settlement of Chautauqua; and (in view of my subsequent shift of attitude) I do not mind confessing that this first aspect of the community depressed me to a perilous melancholy.  I beheld a landscape that reminded me of Wordsworth’s Windermere, except that the lake was broader and the hills less high, deflowered and defamed by the huddled houses of the Chautauqua settlers.  The lake was lovely; and, with this supreme adjective, I forbear from further effort at description.  Upon the southern shore, a natural grove of noble and venerable trees had been invaded by a crowded horror of discomfortable tenements, thrown up by carpenters with a taste for machine-made architectural details, and colored a sickly green, an acid yellow, or an angry brown.  The Chautauqua Settlement, which is surrounded by a fence of palings, covers only two or three square miles of territory; and, in the months of July and August, between fifteen and twenty thousand people are crowded into this constricted area.  Hence a horror of unsightly dormitories, spawning unpredictable inhabitants upon the ambling, muddy lanes.

There have been, in the history of this Assembly, a few salutary fires,—­as a result of which new buildings have been erected which are comparatively easy on the eyes.  The Hall of Philosophy is really beautiful, and is nobly seated among memorable trees at the summit of a little hill.  The Aula Christi tried to be beautiful, and failed; but at least the good intention is apparent.  The Amphitheatre (which seats six or seven thousand auditors) is admirably adapted to its uses; and some of the more recent business buildings, like the Post Office, are inoffensive to the unexacting observer.  A wooded peninsula, which is pleasantly laid out as a park, projects into the lake; and, at the point of this, has lately been erected a campanile which is admirable in both color and proportion.  Indeed, when a fanfaronnade of sunset is blown wide behind it, you suffer a sudden tinge of homesickness for Venice or Ravenna.  It is good enough for that.  But beside it is a helter-skelter wooden edifice which reminds you of Surf Avenue at Coney Island.  Indeed, the Settlement as a whole exhibits still an overwhelmment of the unaesthetic, and appalls the eye of the new-comer from a more considerative world.

On the way back from the lovely campanile to the hotel, I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two mud-puddles connected by a gutter.  This monstrosity turned out to be a relief-map of Palestine.  Little children, with uncultivated voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the insanitary Sea of Galilee.—­Then I encountered a wooden edifice with castellated towers and machicolated battlements, which called itself (with a large label) the Men’s Club; and from this I fled, with almost a sense of relief, to the hotel itself, now sprawling low and dark beneath its Boston-brown-bread cupola.