"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 alphabets; they vitalized stone, and
their poets were minster builders; their epics, cathedrals.
This is why one cathedral - like Strasbourg, or Notre Dame - has a
thousand fold the power of any number of Madeleines. The Madeleine is
simply a building; these are poems.
