61 



of art. It was not acquaintance with the recognized canons of art that 

 made the architect, but the power to project himself as it were into the 

 media of his calling, and thus expound, in characters of wrought and 

 can'ed stone, the dictates of the oracle within. It was the same in 

 poetry, which was not rythmic or cadenced words, but a voice of the 

 heart — *' a thought so passionate and alive, that like the spirit of a plant 

 or an animal, it had an architecture of its own." 



In every one of the arts, the same law held sway : the elements used 

 for any one art, as essential to a given expression, were those which were 

 also employed in the others. Let sublimity, for example, be sought, 

 and under the hand of the architect, the broad, simple, and harmonious 

 masses rose up till we stood under the dome of St. Pauls, or gazed on 

 the chaste fame of Minerva. The musician came, and the orchestra 

 was thronged with its thousand voices ; in broad streams of sound 

 poured out each well-defined phmse, with a full and telling energy, as 

 with a voice of deep calling unto deep ; the answering parts fugued in, 

 whilst harmonic purity added its soul of strength to all, and we listened 

 enti'anced wliilst Handel rolled out the sphered thunders of his Halle- 

 lujah. The sculptor essayed, and the colossal statue towered up : in 

 broad folds fell the drapery; lofty decision of expression marked the 

 attitude, energetic fulness the contour, a dignified purity the whole 

 treatment : and we gazed on the Moses of Michael Angelo. The poet 

 next succeeded, and then (in the highest degree) the elementaiy terms 

 were no longer words, but living realities : the magnitude was magni- 

 tude of soul ; the breadth, a world-encircling comprehensiveness of the 

 intellect ; the decision, a subtle and unening exactitude of definition ; 

 the fulness, an unexhaustible depth and pregnancy of meaning; the 

 purity, a celestial extiltation of language : and we drank in the inspira- 

 tion of that most ancient poem spoken unto Job '* out of the whirlwind." 



He entered at some length into a history of the fine arts, in order to 

 show that unity in their career, that simultaneous progress, which natu- 

 rally and inevitably resulted from the fact of their central identity. 

 The Parthenon was built and decorated, and architecture and sculpture 

 attained their highest pitch of excellence in Greece, under Phidias, 

 Pyraxitiles, Polycletus, Lyssippus, Ictinus, and others, when or about 

 the same time that ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote their tragic 

 poems : that purity of feeling and perfection of intellect that revealed 

 itself through her poetry, her philosophy, her laws, were prominent also 

 in the arts of Greece, which were alike devoted to the honour of the 

 gods and the reward of heroism and virtue. 



After an examination of the arts among the Romans, he entered on 

 the origin of Christian art, and observed that the spirit of Christianity 



