Old houses mended,
Cost little less than new, before they're ended.
Silently as a dream the fabric rose;
No sound of hammer or of saw was there.
A man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting at a sheet of paper.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.
The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity:
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Middle wall of partition.
An arch never sleeps.
Die Baukunst ist eine erstarrte Musik.
Architecture is frozen music.
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.
No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence.
When I lately stood with a friend before [the cathedral of] Amiens, ... he asked me how it happens that we can no longer build such piles? I replied: "Dear Alphonse, men in those days had convictions (Ueberzeugungen), we moderns have opinions (Meinungen) and it requires something more than an opinion to build a Gothic cathedral.
So that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.
Grandeur * * * consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the gods see everywhere.
The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded, with his own, into the walls,
As offerings unto God.
Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest of all the arts.
Anon, out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose, like an exhalation.
Nor did there want
Cornice or frieze with bossy sculpture graven.
The hasty multitude
Admiring enter'd, and the work some praise,
And some the architect: his hand was known
In heaven by many a tower'd structure high,
Where scepter'd angels held their residence,
And sat as princes.
Thus when we view some well-proportion'd dome,
* * * * * *
No single parts unequally surprise,
All comes united to th' admiring eyes.
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
