as a poet attunes his thought to the harmony and rhythm of verse.  Antique prejudices, bent into rigid conformity with antique rubrics, are often shocked at the strange innovations of these new Dissenters from the faith of Palladio and Philibert Delorme,—­shocked at the naked humanity in the new works, and would cover it with the conventional fig-leaves prescribed in the homilies of Vignola.  Laymen, accustomed to the cold architectural proprieties of the old Renaissance, and habituated to the formalities of the five orders, the prudish decorum of Italian window-dressings and pediments and pilasters and scrolls, are apt to be surprised at such strange dispositions of unprecedented and heretical features, that the intention of the building in which they occur is at once patent to the most casual observer, and the story of its destination told with the eloquence of a poetical and monumental language.  All great revolutions have proved how hard it is to break through the crust of custom, and this has been no exception to the rule; yet in justice it must be said that every intelligent mind, every eye possessing the “gifted simplicity of vision”, to use a happy phrase of Hawthorne’s, recognizes the truth and wisdom there are in the blessed renovations of the Romantique, and looks upon them as the sweeps of a besom clearing away the dust and cobwebs which ages of prejudice have spread thickly around the magnificent art of architecture.

Unlike the unwieldy and ponderous classic or Italian systems, whose pride cannot stoop to anything beneath the haughtiest uses of life without being broken into the whims of the grotesque and Rococo, the Romantique has already exhibited the graceful ease with which it may be applied to the most playful as well as the most serious employments of Art.  It has decorated the perfumer’s shop on the Boulevards with the most delicate fancies woven out of the odor of flowers and the finest fabrics of Nature, and, in the hands of Labrouste, has built the great Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve, the most important work with pure Greek lines, and perhaps the most exquisite, while it is one of the most serious, of modern buildings.  The lore of the classics and the knowledge of the natural world, idealized and harmonized by affectionate study, are built up in its walls, and, internally and externally, it is a work of the highest Art.  The Romantique has also been used with especial success in funereal monuments.  Structures of this character, demanding earnestly in their composition the expression of human sentiment, have hitherto been in most cases unsatisfactory, as they have been built out of a narrow range of Renaissance, Egyptian and Gothic motives, originally invented for far different purposes, and, since then, classified, as it were, for use, and reduced to that inflexible system out of which have come the formal restrictions of modern architecture.  Hence these motives