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    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion: “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”
    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion: “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”
    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion: “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”
    Ebook37 pages31 minutes

    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion: “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”

    By Henry Van Dyke

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    About this ebook

    Henry Van Dyke’s The Mansion is essentially a Christmas novella that tells the story of a wealthy man known for his very generous donations to the church as well as for his contributions to charitable foundations and associations. However, he always insists on the mentioning of his name whenever he makes a contribution. Generally, it is from this contestable behavior that emanates the moral of the story. Most readers will also notice an obvious similarity between Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Dyke’s story which is distinguished by its American context. Like Dickens, Dyke seems to convey the message that a true act of charity and goodness should be done without any attempt at profiting from it. When one night Dyke’s protagonist dreams of going to heaven, he is surprised to see the very luxurious palaces built for the poor, as well as for other philanthropists, while his own home is just a simple hut. A guide in heaven explains to him that they use only what he sends from Earth for the building of his heavenly home. Waking up from his dream, the man immediately decides to become a different man and starts giving to the poor without imposing any sort caveat.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9781780007199
    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion: “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”
    Author

    Henry Van Dyke

    Henry Van Dyke (1928–2011) was born in Allegan, Michigan, and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where his parents were professors at Alabama State College. He served in the Army in occupied Germany, playing flute in the 427th Marching Band. There he abandoned his early ambition to become a concert pianist and began to write. In 1958, after attending the University of Michigan on the G.I. Bill and living in Ann Arbor, he moved to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Henry taught creative writing part-time at Kent State University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993, and was the author of four novels, including Blood of Strawberries, a sequel to Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes.

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    • 3/5
      A pillar of the community, a man of rectitude and charity, differs with his son about several matters. The son wants to give up business for a while and to assist a friend of his in need, both of which the father disapproves of. On Christmas Eve, the father dreams of his arrival in Heaven, which shows him the true worth of his life and actions.Van Dyke wrote several inspiring fables of this sort. This one takes aim at the self-satisfied and comfortable. The message is still apt.

    Book preview

    Henry Van Dyke - The Mansion - Henry Van Dyke

    The Mansion

    By Henry van Dyke

    There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied.  Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain.

    The house was not beautiful.  There was nothing in its straight front of chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the imagination. 

    But it was eminently respectable, and in its way imposing.  It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewelers, the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers, the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail traders in

    luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius’ Church.

    At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing neighborhood. 

    It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the land on which it stood.

    John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. 

    He was a self-made man.  But in making himself he had chosen a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules. 

    There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him.

    He was solid, correct, and justly successful.  His minor tastes, of course, had been carefully kept up to date.

    At the proper time, pictures of the Barbizon masters, old English plate and portraits, bronzes by Barye and marbles by Rodin, Persian carpets and Chinese porcelains, had been introduced to the mansion.  It contained a Louis Quinze reception-room, an Empire drawing-room, a Jacobean dining-room, and various apartments dimly reminiscent of the styles of furniture affected by deceased monarchs.  That the hallways were too short for the historic perspective did not make much difference. 

    American decorative art is capable de tout, it absorbs all periods. 

    Of each period Mr. Weightman wished to have something of the best. 

    He understood its value, present as a certificate, and prospective as an investment.

    It was only in the architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian.  His country house at

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