nd
Herder. Here they have walked many a time, I suppose. But the inside--a
forest-like firmament, glorious in holiness; windows many-hued as the
Hebrew psalms; a gloom solemn and pathetic as man's mysterious
existence; a richness gorgeous and manifold as his wonderful nature. In
this Gothic architecture we see earnest northern races, whose nature was
a composite of influences from pine forest, mountain, and storm,
expressing in vast proportions and gigantic masonry those ideas of
infinite duration and existence which Christianity opened before them.

The ethereal eloquence of the Greeks could not express the rugged
earnestness of souls wrestling with those fearful mysteries of fate, of
suffering, of eternal existence, declared equally by nature and
revelation. This architecture is Hebraistic in spirit, not Greek; it
well accords with the deep ground-swell of the Hebrew prophets. "Lord,
thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the
mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and
the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. A
thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past. And as
a watch in the night."

The objection to Gothic architecture, as compared with Greek, is, that
it is less finished and elegant. So it is. It symbolizes that state of
mind too earnest for mere polish, too deeply excited for laws
of exact proportions and architectural refinement. It is Alpine
architecture--vast, wild, and sublime in its foundations, yet bursting
into flowers at every interval. The human soul seems to me an imprisoned
essence, striving after somewhat divine. There is a struggle in it, as
of suffocated flame; finding vent now through poetry, now in painting,
now in music, sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and
fissures, but the flame is one.

Moreover, as society grows from barbarism upward, it tends to
inflorescence, at certain periods, as do plants and trees; and some
races flower later than others. This architecture was the first
flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent
not by imaged words and vitalized alphabet; they vitalized stone, and
their poets were minster-builders; their epics, cathedrals.

This is why one cathedral--like Strassburg, or Notre Dame--has a
thousandfold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is
simply a building; these are poems. I never look at one of them without
fe