finds nowhere a resting-place. Gradually we find these curves bending inward; a new centre of movement appears in their midst, and we find that, while apparently stationary or retrograding, the world has been taking a grand stride onward and centering toward a new age, animated by a new spirit.

In that marvellous era of Athenian culture, which alone redeems the past from the charge of barbarism, we have such a completed cycle. We are now in the growth of a new cycle, to which the thought of all enlightened mankind is again rounding inward. There has been a development of seeds that lay unquickened in man's inmost nature; a growth, under the sunlight of modern civilization, of germs that lay dormant through the earlier eras of human progress. The world is not treading in the footsteps of the past. The era of the Olympian deities is now to us but a curious study, the cosmogony of the Greeks a strange phase of the infancy of human thought.

Man's upward movement through time is not from one grade to another of physical development. It is not so much a change in degree as in kind. From the physical he advances into the mental, from the mental into the spiritual domains of thought. The modern world stands not only above, but beyond and apart from the ancient, and is infiltrated with a sentiment alien to the spirit of ancient thought. Everywhere throughout history we see the stepping-stones of this progress. The Dark Ages stand between two widely distinct eras of human development. No strict dividing line can be drawn between the end of the one and the beginning of the other, yet the historian finds that when civilization dawned upon the night of these middle ages Europe had gained a new mental inspiration.

The brain of the past, to speak phrenologically, had only attained a partial development. Man's mentality may be considered as comprising three grand divisions-the animal, the mental, and the spiritual. Of these the animal probably culminated in the remote past, and is displayed more truly in the, so-called, instincts of animals than in any but the lowest grade of human organization. The mental culminated in the cities

of ancient Greece, reaching a splendor of manifestation that can never again be attained. For now the animal and mental orders of thought are yielding to the overpowering development of the spiritual, and the human head is slowly rounding to its full harmony of form, as the mind is approaching its fulness of manifestation. No longer does the over-abundant development of the posterior brain draw back the head upon its base and assimilate man's facial aspect to that of the lower animals. Not much longer shall the excessive development of the anterior draw the head forward. For now the superior organs are receiving their development, the head aspires upward, and a just balance between all the organs of the brain is being established.

In illustrating this difference between the spirit of the past and that of the present we find no more significant feature than in the architecture of the two periods. The Grecian temple stands in marble evidence of the character of the Grecian mind. In its rigidly correct curves and straight lines, its severe simplicity and its harmonious proportions it approaches the perfection of pure art, and takes the senses captive by its grace and harmony.

The Greek was essentially a creature of the senses. The world appealed but to his eyes and ears. To him nature culminated in the line of beauty; and his ideal of perfection lay in the three words,* proportion, grace, and harmony. But the human soul began, at length, to break loose from this bondage of the senses, and to seek in nature a response to a higher standard of perfection than that which is susceptible of measurement by eye and ear.

Among the first evidences of this escape from the sensa tional era of art, is the Corinthian order of architecture, in which the imaginative began to triumph over the logical brain, and that beauty which will not be bound by line or measure to display itself. But this order, though of Hellenic birth, proved alien to the spirit of Grecian civilization. The chaste simplicity of the Doric, the simple elegance of the Ionic were

* Hazlitt on Art, p. 350.

far more pleasing to this geometrically cultivated race; and the Corinthian was but little used in Greece till after the conquest by Alexander, which impressed Grecian logic with a trace of that barbarian imagination, so strongly displayed in the history of the Macedonian conqueror.

Yet the Corinthian was seized on with avidity by the Roman mind, and widely used to adorn the imperial city. The phase of mind which had progressed through long ages of Assyrian, Chaldean, Persian and Egyptian empire, and culminated in the Ionian and the Grecian cities, was passed. The birth of a new era was at hand; and Rome gave the first impulse to that new phase of progress which has not yet reached its culmination. With the Corinthian, their favorite architectural system, the Romans combined the arch and the vault, and in the employment of these aids, as in the forms of their Basilicæ, gave the inception to the Christian architecture of the following ages.

Throughout they displayed a type of mind essentially different from that of the Greeks, replacing the sensual characteristics of the latter by a tendency towards that which impresses the soul rather than the eye. It was as yet but a tendency, but such tendencies are vanes which show which way the winds of thought are beginning to blow.*

The Dark Ages past, we find the logical simplicity of classic architecture displaced by the rich exuberance of the Gothic cathedral—that ornate and grand order, so heedless of simplicity, so full of spiritual significance! Simultaneously in Asia arose the light and intricate Saracenic, an order showing a phase of mental progress markedly different from that of the Gothic. In this we see the gayety and exuberant fancy of the Asiatic mind, as contrasted with the gloomy and imaginative tendencies of Germanic thought. Yet they are alike in spirit, the aspiration displayed in the dome, steeple and pinnacle of the Gothic being paralleled by the springing arch, slender minaret and bubble-like dome of the Saracenic.

"Les Romains avoient cependant plus de vraie sensibilité que les Grecs; les mœurs sévéres conservent mieux les affections sensibles, que le vie licenciéuse a laquelle les Grecs s'abandonnoient."-De Stael, Littérature, p. 150.

The characteristic forms of classic architecture are horizontal, reposing, definite; of the Christian, vertical, aspiring, indefinite. Nowhere in the Parthenon can we find a trace of the spiritual or of the aspiring. It is based firmly upon the earth and gravitates downwards in all its dimensions. But the Gothic soars upward in a thousand springing lines, in all its intricacy of arches, in its lofty roof, and the heavenward pointing finger of its spire.* Its informing character is to be seen in no one feature, but in the compound effect of all its elements and in the action of these upon the human mind. In its interior is engendered an involuntary awe, as if the soul of man shrank in the presence of a grander soul.

In Hellenic architecture no such feeling ever arises. It is all of the earth, earthy. It arouses our admiration of harmonious proportions, charms our senses, but fails to awaken in the soul a sense of the unseen and awe-inspiring. In the Grecian temple man looks upon himself with pride at his own greatness; in the Gothic church, with humility at his own littleness.

The Greek looked not upon nature with our eyes. He admired in the forest its sturdy columns, pressing downwards like the limbs of giants upon the earth. We delight in the green arching canopy, borne upward, as it were, by wings, so broadly does it overshadow the trunks beneath. In his architecture he emulated the upright grace of these and the horizontal grandeur of the rock arch. mind, on the contrary, seeks to reproduce the leafy canopy, and to engender within the soul a sense of Nature's simplicity, rather than an admiration of her grace.

huge trunks The modern effects of the

It is doubtful that of the expressions of affection toward external nature to be found in heathen writers there are any of which the balance and leading thought cling not to her sensual aspects. Her pleasant influences they received, perhaps, in a more noble way than we, but they found nothing except fear

"Egyptian and Greek buildings stand, for the most part, by their own weight and mass; but in the Gothic vaults and traceries there is

a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb or the fibres of a tree, an elastic tension united into every form of nervous entanglement."

Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 11, Chap. vi.

upon the bare mountain or in the ghastly glen. The Hybla heather they loved more for its sweet hives than its purple hues.*

There is deep significance in a passage from Homer, describing Ulysses casting himself down upon the rushes and the corn-giving land at the river shore (the rushes and corn being to him only good for sustenance), when we compare it with that in which Dante tells us he was ordered to descend to the shore of the lake as he entered purgatory, to gather a rush and gird himself with it, it being to him not only the emblem of rest, but of humility under chastisement, the rush being the only plant which can grow there. "No plant which bears leaves or hardens its bark can grow on that shore, because it does not yield to the chastisement of its waves."+

Between the sculpture of ancient and modern times there exists the same distinction as between their architecture. Grecian statuary yields us the richest development of the idea of physical beauty and muscular strength. The fathers of art chiselled again and again,in marble, the perfection of the human frame. In the sculpture of Assyria, Egypt, Persia and India we perceive similar efforts to reproduce the physical beauty of man. Through the labors of all these nations we may trace the growth of that art which led up to the marvellous works of Phidias, Praxiteles and their great co-laborers, culminating in the Athene and Zeus of the former, appropriately wrought in ivory and gold, and in the Aphrodite and other remarkable works of the latter. Yet, wonderfully beautiful or grand as many of these works were, it was but beauty of limb and feature, of muscular display or of the rounded lines of youth.

As to imparting to the face a significant expression, or indicating the personality and purpose of the figure otherwise than by the traditional shape and feature, and by the various details of attitude, it was beyond their efforts. It was necessary that they should work in the nude, as it was physical not spiritual expression which they sought to display.

Ruskin, Beauty, p. 6.

Ruskin, Nature, 116.