To Lawrence Smith Butler
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 28, 1901
Many thanks for your nice letter. It was a great pleasure to hear from you, although, to be sure, I knew you were safe at home, far from the wicked orgies of the Quartier latin. We miss you very much in Boston. Aren’t you ever coming to visit your old friends? You should come and gather the chorus of praise which we are raising about the big room at the Union. It is the only noble room in the college and will give many people here their first notion of what good architecture means in practice. Façades and towers and details are one thing, but a beautiful place to live in, noble in colour and proportions, is something new in these parts and, it seems to me, invaluable. The Union seems to be a great success socially and gastronomically—although the ubiquity of ice water is a trifle chilling. The place is much used and the dining room (where I often go to eat) is crowded. Architecturally only the large room is of much consequence, but the rest seems serviceable and inoffensive. As to the gates, we have been suddenly blessed with too large a family of them; they look as if they had been all hatched in a hurry and had not yet got any feathers and hardly knew what they had come into the world for. But when the trees grow and hang about them again and the crude colour is toned down, I think they will seem all right and fall into a natural place in the landscape.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY