| Home -> Paul Elder - > The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition -> Court of the Four Seasons - The North Colonnade by Night | |||
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Court of the Four Seasons
The North Colonnade by Night |
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| To stand in the midst of this curving octagonal court and hear, above the whisper of the trees, the murmur of the four hidden fountains that gush unseen from the base of allegorical groups of statuary, glimpsed through colonnades, is to stand in Hadrian's villa of old, where we hear "Fitly the fountains of silver leap, Whose sound is as soft as the listless flow Of streams that forever linger and go Down delicate, dream-far valleys of sleep." As in a dream, one looks down the last vista to the open rotunda and crescent hemicycle of the Palace of Fine Arts beyond a lagoon that mirrors them on its surface. Rising from the rich, green massing of shrubbery and mossy banks, the rotunda lifts its proud head, encircled with garlands of symbolical figures, as above a grove of Academe. Behind it the soft red walls of the place glow like the fading embers of sunset. These courts, strung like a rope of pearls between the two poles of man's achievement - mechanics and art - are the heart of the Exposition, and in them are treasures of color and form untold. - Edwin Markham |
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