No author's pen ever gave such an individuality to a human home.

It is all the coinage of thoughts that have flooded the hemispheres.

Pages of living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches, panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these mementoes of the men and ages gone.

Every one of these hewn stones cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column's length of thinking done on paper.

It must be true that pure, unaided literary labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it with such treasures of art and history.