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T was from the front platform of a street-car, as it rounded the Capitol grounds, that I got my first view of the new Library of Congress crowning a gently rising hill some thousand feet away. Under the morning light it seemed a great oblong box of a whitish-gray, perforated with windows, ribbed and fluted on all four sides with columns, indented with loggias, and surmounted by a gold dome. This dome. they tell me, whether in the blaze of a noonday sun, the varnishing wets of a driving rain, or under the mellow radiance of an August moon, can be seen from twenty miles down the Poto

mac.

Midway on the front of the box prcjects a portico, with more fluted columns, windows, and loggias. Extending from this portico is a great broad platform, overlooking a double flight of granite steps guarded by stone balustrades, that lead down to still other platforms, steps, and balustrades, and so on between grassy slopes below to a wide street fronting the building itself.

This is the new Library of Congress, which has taken five years to build and which will have cost six millions of dollars when finished.

To me, as I looked, the chief charm of this mass of granite lay in its isolation. Not a single building, except the Capitol, lifts its roof higher than the level of the main floor of the building itself. It is like a city set on a hill, its only background being the sky. It dominates everything about it. Its isolation adds dignity to its mass, and the picturesque quality of its sky-line makes it peculiarly impressive.

The details of even a successful architectural work are not always satisfying. The best impressions produced often lie in the edge of the mass as it cuts against the light; the break of the hard, incisive perpendicular by the offset of columns and capital; the softening of right angles by crestings, railings, or the half-round of a dome intersecting a horizontal cornice. Whatever effects are gained by indents of windows-mere shadow-dots; these open arched doors - larger dots; columns

-shaded lines; niches fitted with bustsmere roughings of the surface-are as nothing compared to the lines and proportions of the mass. The great Michael himself, with Praxiteles and Phidias to help, could not model the surface of a building into beauty-in other words, incrust it with statues, busts, wreaths, and scrolls-if the dome were too large for the square of its base, or the tower too short for the roof. The Pyramids illustrated the dignity of simple lines to the ancients; and the old reservoir in New York (the proposed site for another great library), with its simple lines and graceful curves, a structure far more imposing than anything within miles of it, proves every day to moderns that plain surfaces admirably proportioned are infinitely more beautiful than the confectionery adorning many more costly and ornate structures within sight of its walls.

This oblong box of granite, then, in our National Capital, with its horizontal roofline making a bound in its center over the dome-line, and its really superb flights of double staircases, leisurely and by easy stages of successive platforms falling to the street below this box, I say, as a mass, and because of its dominating site, is by far the most impressive of all the buildings of more recent date in Washington.

But if its location is an inspiration and its mass a satisfaction, its interior is no less a delight. You come upon a series of surprises which constantly increase in interest.

The first of these surprises is the superb corridor running parallel with the front of the building, its ceiling high enough to make the back of your neck ache when you study its detail. It is a white and gold corridor, all wainscoted in bluewhite Vermont marble, with pilasters surmounted by double statues, the stucco reliefs touched here and there with gold leaf --not over-touched, nor under-touched each flake of gold accentuating perfectly the precise part of the molding necessary to express its highest relief. The corri dor is in blue-white and yellow-gold,

remember; not reddish-yellow-gold and yellow-white marble. It is in just these shades of difference in tones of color that Mr. Elmer E. Garnsey, the chief decorator, has shown such tact, and it is in just this exercise of a fine perception and a profound knowledge of the fundamental laws that govern the science of color which, applied to the decoration of this building, have made it so fine, and which will make it so profitable as an object-lesson to all students who analyze the means Mr. Garnsey and his assistants have used to produce the effects achieved.

Next in the order of surprises comes the Grand Hall, with its flat roof of stained glass, its granite and marble staircases, columns of colored marbles, and bas-reliefs in stone and bronze. And, finally, we have the last and greatest surprise of all-the interior of the great dome itself, with a center so high that not only the back of your neck but your whole spinal column aches when you try to study Blashfield's superb work more than one hundred feet above you in the collar of the dome itself.

In this dome, more than in any other part of the building, perhaps, have the architect and decorator clasped hands and worked in harmony. The architect began at the floor level with a deep wainscoting of porphyry-colored Tennessee marblea slight purplish-red. Above this he has grouped clusters of splendid columns with gold capitals. Above this again he has placed balconies of Sienna marble-brownish-yellow-reaching to the lower edge of the rim of the bowl of the dome. The decorator then, catching upon his palette all the purple, red-browns, and yellow tones that the architect has given him, has distributed these in the shadows of moldings, behind rosettes set in squares, along flutes and scrolls and fanciful tracery, enlivening and making brilliant the whole by judicious touches here and there of gold, all handled and applied with that same thorough knowledge of the uses and purposes of the metal which were so well understood and admirably exemplified in the corridor first entered.

Under this great dome you will always have to keep still, for this is to be the great public reading-room. Here men will talk in whispers, while some sit silent for hours, their noses in leather bindings.

But

Others will tiptoe about attendants, voicing their se low, respectful tones. that not even the stringent ing-room will produce all will be felt. The dignity a of this majestic overar marble, bronze, and gold an effect of its own. If it purpose than to subdue encourage reverence in the ican, it will be cheap at Saint Sophia, San Marco, hush men into silence a much by the beauty and interior lines as by the r by the several faiths the glorify. It is just as im] to think of dancing a f the dome of St. Peter's as some of us to be willin mass in a French boudoir

To recapitulate, we have granite box set on a hill a by a dome. This dome, but a small portion of the

From the base of this c side lining of the box rur row buildings, the four fo of a Greek cross. The Grand Hall lie in one arr the other three arms are down buildings nine storie seventy-five feet wide, eac sides.

These contain the which can be shelved f million of volumes.

These stacks deserve es not only because of the a of the architect in so plac space between the dom side of the box that the light from all sides, but ingenious method of space-saving designed an the present engineer-in-ch R. Greene, C.E., Gener cessor.

The individual book stacks are each eight fe shelf being within easy re of the average man. TH enough apart for two pers for a book, to stand back floor they stand upon is 1 marble slab set in an i tween this marble slab ar