s,
whose extensive buildings join the church at the north or south. The
church is wedded to monasticism; one supports the other, and both make a
unity exceedingly efficient in the Middle Ages. The communication
between the church and the convent is effected by a cloister,--a vaulted
gallery surrounding a square, open space, where the brothers walk and
meditate, but do not talk, except in undertone or whisper; for all the
precincts are sacred, made for contemplation and silence,--a retreat
from the noisy, barbaric world. Connected with the cloisters is a court
opening into the refectory, where the brothers dine on herbs and eggs
and a little meat,--also in silence, and, where the rule is strict, in
gloom,--an ascetic, dreary discipline. The whole range of buildings is
enclosed with walls, like a fortress. You see in this architecture the
gloom and desolation which overspread the world. Churches are heavy and
sombre; they are places for dreary meditation on the end of the world,
on the failure of civilization, on the degradation of humanity,--and yet
the only places where man may be brought in contact with the Deity who
presides over a fallen world, exalting human hopes to heaven, where
miseries end, and worship begins.

This style of architecture prevailed till the twelfth century, and was
seen in its greatest perfection in Germany under the Saxon emperors,
especially in the Rhenish provinces, as in the cathedrals of Spires,
Mentz, Worms, and Nuremberg. Its general effect was gloomy and heavy; a
separation from the outward world,--a world disgraced by feudal wars and
peasants' wrongs and general ignorance, which made men sad, morose,
inhuman. It flourished in ages when the poor had no redress, and were
trodden under the feet of hard feudal masters; when there was no law but
of brute force; when luxuries were few and comforts rare,--an age of
hardship, privation, poverty, suffering; an age of isolations and
sorrows, when men were forced to look beyond the grave for peace and
hope, when immortality through a Redeemer was the highest inspiration of
life. Everybody was agitated by fears. The clergy made use of this
universal feeling by presenting the terrors of the law,--the penalty of
sin,--everlasting physical burnings, from which the tortured soul could
be extricated only by penance and self-expiation, offerings to the
Church, and entire subserviency to the will of the priest, who held the
keys of heaven and hell. The men