such sweet repose there,—­all these are gone.  Quality has yielded to quantity, and nothing is left save those external characteristics which he who runs may read, and he who pauses to study finds cold, vacant, and unsatisfactory.  What the Ionic capital of Rome wants, and what all Roman Art wants, is the inward life, the living soul, which gives a peculiar expressiveness to every individual work, and raises it infinitely above the dangerous academic formalism of the schools.

In view of our own architecture, that which touches our own experience and is of us and out of us, the danger of this academic formalism cannot be too emphatically spoken of.  When one carefully examines the transition from Greek to Roman Art, he cannot but be impressed with the fact, that the spirit which worked in this transition was the spirit of a vulgar and greedy conqueror.  To illustrate his rude magnificence and to give a finer glory to his triumph, by right of conquest he appropriated the Greek orders.  But the living soul which was in those orders, and gave them an infinity of meaning, an ever-varying poetry of expression, could not be enslaved; nor could the worshipful Love which created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier.  So they became lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified, subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in moulds.  This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of design.  The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome, it became academic.  Thus systematized, it is true, it awes us by the superb redundancy and sumptuousness of its use in the temples and forums reared by that omnipresent power from Britannia to Baalbec.  But the Art which is systematized is degraded.  Emerson somewhere remarks that man descends to meet his fellows,—­meaning, I suppose, that he has to sacrifice some of the higher instincts of his individuality when he desires to become social, and to meet his fellows on that low level of society, which, made up as it is of many individualities, has none of those secret aspirations which arise out of his own isolation.  Society is a systematic aggregation for the benefit of the multitude, but great men lift themselves above it into a purer atmosphere.  As Longfellow says, “They rise like towers in the city of God.”  So with Art,—­when we systematize it for the indiscriminate use of thoughtless and unloving men, we degrade it.  And a singular proof of this is found in the fact that the Roman academical orders never have anything in them reserved from the common ken.  They are superficial.  They say all that