Surely it is very dull in us, out of our present enlightenment, to continue to distinguish the mediaeval times as the Dark Ages, as if they were glimmering and ghostly, and men groped about in them blindly, living in a sort of dusky romance of feudality.  Did you ever study De la Roche’s incarnation of Mediaeval Art in his Hemicycle,—­that long saintly robe with its still and serious folds, that fair dreamy face, those upturned eyes, “the homes of silent prayer,” the contemplative repose?  It is truly an exquisite idealization; yet there is something wanting.  I believe the piety of those days was rather a passion than a sentiment.  Their “beauty of holiness” was rather an active emotional impulse than a passive spiritualization, and was incomplete without a material expression, a tangible demonstration of itself.  Like the fabled Narcissus, it yearned for its own image.  Hence the joy and luxury of the ecclesiastical buildings of that period.  They were the very blossoming of the tree of knowledge.  This was, indeed, an unenlightened, perhaps a superstitious principle of worship; but it was enthusiastic, self-sacrificing, and chivalrous.  It, indeed, sent the stylite to his pillar, the hermit to the wilderness, the ascetic to the scourge and hair-cloth shirt; but it also led the warrior to the Holy Land, the beggar to the castle-hearth, and the workman to the building of the House of God.  It is no wonder that a religion born thus in childlike fervor, and seeking expression in outward signs, built upward.  It is no wonder that out of the prosaic elements of the roof it made the spiritual essence of the spire.  If we look through the whole range of architectural forms in classic or mediaeval times, we shall find no one so indicative of any human emotion as this simple outline is of the highest of all emotions,—­prayer.  It is a significant fact, that the sentiment of aspiration is nowhere hinted at in Classic Art, and we look in vain for it in all pagan architectures.  This is not surprising.  The worshippers who built in those schools demonstrated there all the noblest ideas they were capable of,—­intellectual beauty, dignity, power, truth, chastity, courage, and all the other virtues cherished in their theologies; but their personal relations with any higher sphere of existence, vague and undefined as they were, called for no expression in their temples, and obtained none.

The pyramidal form has ever possessed peculiar fascinations for men, and, from its simplicity, grandeur, and power, has been used in all ages with innumerable modifications in those structures whose object was to impress and overawe,—­as in the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of India and Mexico, and in all the earliest funereal monuments.  It involved a rude symbolism, which recommended itself to the barbarous childhood of nations.  But it was not until the pyramid was sharpened and spiritualized into the spire that it gained its completest triumph over the secret emotions