CHAPTER XV.
THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA The opening of the University of Virginia was an event of prime importance for the higher education in the whole country, and really marks a new era.
-- CHARLES FORSTER SMITH.
Like Monticello, the buildings of the University of Virginia are those of an intellectual, a classicist, a purist, and, like it, they might have been austere but for the warmth of their red brick and the glow of their white-columned porticos.

But they are cheerful buildings, which, individually and as a group, attain a geometrical yet soft perfection, a supreme harmony of form and color.
The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the Pantheon at Rome.

From the rotunda, at either side, starts a white-columned arcade connecting the various houses which are distributed at graceful intervals along the margins of the rectangular lawn, above which loom the tops of even rows of beautiful old trees.
Flanking the buildings of the lawn, and reached by brick walks which pass between the famous serpentine walls (walls but one brick thick which support themselves on the snake-fence principle, by progressing in a series of reverse curves), are the "ranges": solid rows of one-story student dormitories built of brick and fronted by colonnades which command other lawns and other trees.
With a single exception, restorations and additions to the university have been made with reverence and taste, and the Brooks Museum, the one architectural horror of the place, fortunately does not stand upon the lawn.

Since it is said that beauty could not exist were there not ugliness for contrast, this building may have its uses; certainly, after a glance at it, one looks back with renewed delight at the structures of the central group.
Most superb of all, always there hangs at night, above the buildings and the tree-tops, a glorious full moon.

At least I suppose it always hangs there, for though it seemed to us very wonderful, every one else seemed used to it.
Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by moonlight.