be a colossal and magnificent crystallization, so splendidly do its
forests of spires, its intersections of moldings, its population of
statues, its fringes of fretted, hollowed, embroidered and open
marblework, ascend in multiple and interminable bright forms against the
pure blue sky.

Truly is it the mystic candelabra of visions and legends, with a hundred
thousand branches bristling and overflowing with sorrowing thorns and
ecstatic roses, with angels, virgins, and martyrs upon every flower and
on every thorn, with infinite myriads of the triumphant Church springing
from the ground pyramidically even into the azure, with its millions of
blended and vibrating voices mounting upward in a single shout,
hosannah!...

We enter, and the impression deepens. What a difference between the
religious power of such a church and that of St. Peter's at Rome! One
exclaims to himself, this is the true Christian temple! Four rows of
enormous eight-sided pillars, close together, seem like a serried hedge
of gigantic oaks. Their strange capitals, bristling with a fantastic
vegetation of pinnacles, canopies, foliated niches and statues, are like
venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread
out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of
the arches being filled with an inextricable network of foliage, thorny
sprigs and light branches, twining and intertwining, and figuring the
aerial dome of a mighty forest. As in a great wood, the lateral aisles
are almost equal in height to that of the center, and, on all sides, at
equal distances apart, one sees ascending around him the secular
colonnades.

Here truly is the ancient Germanic forest, as if a reminiscence of the
religious groves of Irmensul. Light pours in transformed by green,
yellow and purple panes, as if through the red and orange tints of
autumnal leaves. This, certainly, is a complete architecture like that
of Greece, having, like that of Greece, its root in vegetable forms. The
Greek takes the trunk of the tree, drest, for his type; the German the
entire tree with all its leaves and branches. True architecture,
perhaps, always springs out of vegetal nature, and each zone may have
its own edifices as well as plants; in this way oriental architectures
might be comprehended--the vague idea of the slender palm and of its
bouquet of leaves with the Arabs, and the vague idea of the colossal,
prolific, dilated and bristling vegetation