of art. You see forms of beauty which never entered into your "forge of thought" You are filled with new and delightful emotions, but they spring from new impressions of the genius of man, of his destiny and history. No; these cathedrals are not like the arches of our forests, the temples for inevitable worship, but they are the fitting place for the apotheosis of genius."[1]
I promised to give you honestly my impressions, and I do so. I may have come too old and inflexible to these temples; but, though I feel their beauty thrilling my heart and brimming my eyes, they do not strike me as in accord with the simplicity, universality, and spirituality of the Gospel of Jesus. Some modern unbelievers maintain that Christianity is a worn-out form of religion. Is it not rather true that the spirit escapes from the forms in which man, always running to the material, would imbody it?
We took our lunch, and let me, en passant, bless the country where you can always command what is best suited "to restore the weak and 'caying nature," as ——— pathetically called it in his before-dinner
- ↑ If perchance there is one among my readers unacquainted with Bryant's Poems, he may thank me for referring to his Forest Hymn, beginning thus:
"The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learn'd
To hew the shaft and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them; ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication."
