architecture--vast, wild, and sublime in its foundations, yet bursting
into flowers at every interval. The human soul seems to me an imprisoned
essence, striving after somewhat divine. There is a struggle in it, as
of suffocated flame; finding vent now through poetry, now in painting,
now in music, sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and
fissures, but the flame is one.

Moreover, as society grows from barbarism upward, it tends to
inflorescence, at certain periods, as do plants and trees; and some
races flower later than others. This architecture was the first
flowering of the Gothic race; they had no Homers; the flame found vent
not by imaged words and vitalized alphabet; they vitalized stone, and
their poets were minster-builders; their epics, cathedrals.

This is why one cathedral--like Strassburg, or Notre Dame--has a
thousandfold 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 toward 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, Strassburg has nothing
except peaked-roofed houses, dotted with six or seven rows of gable
windows.

[Footnote A: From "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands." Mrs. Stowe