is coming to
maturity, and that it is with this new world, and not with the old
world, that the movement & ourselves have now to do.

To resume, and to revert to what I was about to say.

In that magnificent brief lecture on Gothic Architecture, which was
first spoken as a lecture at the New Gallery for the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society in the year 1889, and afterwards printed by the
Kelmscott Press during and in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in the New
Gallery, 1893, Mr. Morris traced, with lightning-like swiftness and
clearness, the progress of Gothic Architecture from its first inception
by the Romans in the invention of the Arch to its consummation in the
exquisitely poised and traceried buildings of the close of the
fifteenth century.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Mr. Morris says, 'the great
change' came, & Mr. Morris means that we and Architecture, our
principal structural expression, entered upon a period of decay. But I
would rather--and here is my point of difference--I would rather put
it, that the great change came in that the inner vision was substituted
for the outer; or, better still, that one inner vision was substituted
for another inner vision and that the outward expression of the latter
was arrested. Its buildings had been built and the passion for them
exhausted, for the world which had inspired them had vanished, &
another had been born or created in its place: partly another world of
fact, the newly discovered continent of America, and the whole round
world itself; partly another world of ideas, the ancient world and its
literature, Greece and Rome. At the end of the fifteenth century the
printing press was at work, and Europe left for a time the outer world,
the world of the senses and material building, and entered into the
inner world, the world of imaginative reason, of ideas--communicable
henceforward, for a time, by the printed page only, whereon only it
could build up and contemplate the vision of its extended universe.

Ever since that time this vision has been growing, taking on new matter
for greater change still, and now it is worldwide indeed, and the time
has come to cast its inspirations into form, to embody them in works of
Art.

What of the past is past is no matter of regret, but somewhat of the
past is imperishable because it is of all time: such is the instinct to
build. The building of the past is built and is in decay. The building
of the future has yet to b