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.
I never look at one of them without feeling that gravitation of soul
towards its artist which poetry always excites. Often the artist is
unknown; here we know him; Erwin von Steinbach, poet, prophet, priest,
in architecture.
We visited his house--a house old and quaint, and to me _full_ of
suggestions and emotions. Ah, if there be, as the apostle vividly
suggests, houses not made with hands, strange splendors, of which
these are but shadows, that vast religious spirit may have been
finding scope for itself where all the forces of nature shall have
been made tributary to the great conceptions of the soul.
Save this cathedral, Strasbourg has nothing except peaked-roofed
houses, dotted with six or seven rows of gable windows.
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