and when he turns from the beauty he should express to his own beauty of expression, his work becomes false.  And it may be justly affirmed that perfection of workmanship in Art is where the senses are touched just enough, and in just the right way, to kindle the mind; and this too without making the mind distinctly conscious of being kindled; for when the soul is moved perfectly both in kind and degree, self-consciousness is lost in the interest of that which moves it.

Hence it is that all deep and earnest feeling, all high and noble thought so naturally puts on a style of modesty and reserve.  It communicates itself, not by verbal emphasis or volume, but by a sort of blessed infection too subtile and too potent for words to convey.  Volubility strangles it; and it is felt to be insincere when it grows loquacious.  A wordy grief is merely a grief from the throat outwards; “the grief that does not speak,” this it is that “whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.”  And the truly eloquent speaker or writer is not he who says a multitude of fine things in finely turned language and figures, which is very easily done, but he who says just the right things, and says them in the fewest, simplest, and aptest words.  As for the speaker who lives, not in the inspiration of his theme, but in the display of his eloquence, we may rest assured that he will never say any thing worth hearing:  his work will naturally turn all to mere elocution; which may be described as the art of pronouncing nothing in such a way as to make it pass for something grand.

Thus there appears to be a profound natural sympathy or affinity between the forces of religion and the forms of Art.  Therefore it is that the higher efficacies of Christian culture and the deeper workings of religious thought and emotion have instinctively sought to organize and enshrine themselves in artistic creations; no other mode or power of expression being strong enough to hold them, or inclusive enough to contain them.  It is in such works as the ancient marvels of ecclesiastical building that the Christian mind has found its most fitting and most operative eloquence.

What was the motive-principle, what the inspiring power, of those architectural wonders that transport the impress of mediaeval piety across the ocean of so many centuries?  Wordsworth, referring to some of the English cathedrals, says,—­

    “They dreamt not of a perishable home,
    Who thus could build.”

And, sure enough, we may well deem that nothing less than the most intense and burning conceptions of eternity could have inspired the souls of men and made them strong enough to project and accomplish those stupendous structures which, in their silent majesty and awe-inspiring suggestiveness, are the most persuasive and the most unanswerable preachers of Christianity that the Church of two thousand years has produced.  “They builded better than they knew.”  And what