latures in the
severest proportions, and fitted them with ornaments drawn from the
living world,--plants and animals, especially images of God's highest
work, even of man; and of man not worn and macerated and dismal and
monstrous, but of man when most resplendent in the perfections of the
primeval strength and beauty. He returned to a style which classical
antiquity carried to great perfection, but which had been neglected by
the new Teutonic nations.

Nor is there evidence that Michael Angelo disdained the creations
especially seen in those Gothic monuments which are still the objects of
our admiration. Who does not admire the church architecture of the
Middle Ages? Of its kind it has never been surpassed. Geometry and
art--the true and the beautiful--meet. Nothing ever erected by the hand
of man surpasses the more famous cathedrals of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, in the richness and variety of their symbolic
decorations. They typify the great ideas of Christianity; they inspire
feelings of awe and reverence; they are astonishing structures, in their
magnitude and in their effect. Monuments are they of religious zeal and
poetical inspiration,--the creations of great artists, although we
scarcely know their names; adapted to the uses designed; the expression
of consecrated sentiments; the marble history of the ages in which they
were erected,--now heavy and sombre when society was enslaved and
mournful; and then cheerful and lofty when Christianity was joyful and
triumphant. Who ever was satisfied in contemplating the diversified
wonders of those venerable structures? Who would lose the impression
which almost overwhelmed the mind when York minster, or Cologne, or
Milan, or Amiens was first beheld, with their lofty spires and towers,
their sculptured pinnacles, their flying buttresses, their vaulted
roofs, their long arcades, their purple windows, their holy altars,
their symbolic carvings, their majestic outlines, their grand
proportions!

But beautiful, imposing, poetical, and venerable as are these hoary
piles, they are not the all in all of art. Suppose all the buildings of
Europe the last four hundred years had been modelled from these
churches, how gloomy would be our streets, how dark and dingy our shops,
how dismal our dwellings, how inconvenient our hotels! A new style was
needed, at least as a supplement of the old,--as lances and shields were
giving place to fire-arms, and the line and the plummet