Among The Very Beautiful Works Of Art Was A Collection Of
Cameos, Including Some Of Cellini's From The Antique, Which Were Really
Entrancing To Look Upon.
Another mansion, which N. P. Willis justly describes as "a fairy palace of
taste and art," though not so extensive, was equally beautiful, and
possessed a large winter-garden.
This was approached by passing through a
succession of very beautiful rooms, the walls of which were hung with
paintings which would have delighted a connoisseur. It was a glass
building with a high dome: a fine fountain was playing in the centre, and
round its marble basin were orange, palm, and myrtle trees, with others
from the tropics, some of them of considerable growth. Every part of the
floor that was not of polished white marble was thickly carpeted with
small green ferns. The gleam of white marble statues, from among the
clumps of orange-trees and other shrubs, was particularly pretty; indeed,
the whole had a fairy-like appearance about it. Such mansions as these
were rather at variance with my ideas of republican simplicity; they
contained apartments which would have thrown into the shade the finest
rooms in Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace. It is not the custom for
Americans to leave large fortunes to their children; their wealth is spent
in great measure in surrounding themselves with the beautiful and the
elegant in their splendid mansions; and it is probable that the adornments
which have been collected with so much expense and trouble will be
dispersed at the death of their present possessors.
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