the spinal column like the
veins of a leaf from its midrib (Illustration 39).

[Illustration 40]

The relation of these laws of beauty to the art of architecture has
been shown already. They are reiterated here only to show that man is
indeed the microcosm--a little world fashioned from the same elements
and in accordance with the same _Beautiful Necessity_ as is the
greater world in which he dwells. When he builds a house or temple he
builds it not literally in his own image, but according to the laws of
his own being, and there are correspondences not altogether fanciful
between the animate body of flesh and the inanimate body of stone. Do
we not all of us, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the fact
of character and physiognomy in buildings? Are they not, to our
imagination, masculine or feminine, winning or forbidding--_human_,
in point of fact--to a greater degree than anything else of man's
creating? They are this certainly to a true lover and student of
architecture. Seen from a distance the great French cathedrals appear
like crouching monsters, half beast, half human: the two towers stand
like a man and a woman, mysterious and gigantic, looking out over city
and plain. The campaniles of Italy rise above the churches and houses
like the sentinels of a sleeping camp--nor is their strangely human
aspect wholly imaginary: these giants of mountain and campagna have
eyes and brazen tongues; rising four square, story above story, with
a belfry or lookout, like a head, atop, their likeness to a man is not
infrequently enhanced by a certain identity of proportion--of ratio,
that is, of height to width: Giotto's beautiful tower is an example.
The caryatid is a supporting member in the form of a woman; in the
Ionic column we discern her stiffened, like Lot's wife, into a pillar,
with nothing to show her feminine but the spirals of her beautiful
hair. The columns which uphold the pediment of the Parthenon are
unmistakably masculine: the ratio of their breadth to their height is
the ratio of the breadth to the height of a man (Illustration 40).

[Illustration 41: THE BODY THE ARCHETYPE OF SACRED EDIFICES.]

[Illustration 42: THE VESICA PISCIS AND THE PLAN OF CHARTRES.]

At certain periods of the world's history, periods of mystical
enlightenment, men have been wont to use the human figure, the soul's
temple, as a sort of archetype for sacred edifices (Illustration 41).
The colossi, with calm inscrutable faces, wh