22 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES . 



escaped on the gale— to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response 

 is what we call Literature. 



Hardly less effective is the treatment of art in the dialogue on The Mean- 

 ing of Good, a treatment almost as perfect in its way as the well-known 

 stanzas quoted from the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" in the course of the 

 discussion, to which we can only allude. Again, in the third or central 

 chapter of the essays on rehgion we may find the following thoughts on 

 the contribution of architecture to reUgion : 



It has raised the niaterial habitation of the Divine, and in doing so has reflected, 

 I think, by a perhaps unconscious symbolism, the forms in which that Divine has 

 been conceived. Surely, at least, one might question whether the diflference between 

 a classical temple and a Gothic church is to be attributed only to a difference of 

 climate, or of technical skill and tradition. It would be a curiously happy chance, 

 if it were merely chance, that made the house destined for the abode of one of the 

 bright Olympians a palace of gleaming marble set on a hill by the sea, perfect in 

 form, brilliant in color, a jewel to reflect the sun and the sky, a harp for the winds to 

 play upon, an incarnation of the spirit of the open air, of the daylight and of the blue 

 heaven; while, for the mysterious Jehovah and the God Man His Son, there rose 

 into gray and weeping skies huge emblems of the cross, crowned with towers aspiring 

 to a heaven unexplored, and arched over huge spaces where the eye is lost in the 

 gloom, where form is dissolved in vagueness, and the white light of day, rejected 

 in its purity, is permitted to pass only upon condition that it depicts in somber colors 

 the pageant of the life of the soul. That architecture has, whether by chance or no, 

 a symbolic value, as well as one purely and simply aesthetic, will not, I think, be 

 disputed by those who are sensitive to such impressions; and, so regarded, archi- 

 tecture has been, and might be again, one of the chief expressions of religion. 



One recognizes throughout the doctriae of Goethe that art rests fimda- 

 mentally on a kind of religious sense, and therefore unites so readily with 

 rehgion ; but one recognizes also an insistence with Morris on the possi- 

 bihties of an intimacy and tenderness of art that shall allow it to become 

 more easily an integral part of our daily hves. 



Foregoing the pleasure of commenting on other phases of Mr. Dickin- 

 son's works, we must content ourselves with a brief mention of his atti- 

 tude to our own land. To the present reviewer he seems to be absolutely 

 fair and candid, albeit his candor is of the unflinching sort. Far too 

 many of his readers both in America and in England will be prone to 

 find his final verdict in the speech of Arthur Ellis, the traveled journalist, 



