But the Romanesque church, with all its richness, is still heavy, dark, impressive, reminding us of the sorrows of the Middle Ages, and the dreary character of prevailing religious sentiments,—­ fervent, sincere, profound, but sad,—­the sentiments of an age of ignorance and faith.

The Crusades came.  A new era burst upon the world.  The old ideas became modified; society became more cheerful, because more chivalric, adventurous, poetic.  The world opened towards the East, and was larger than was before supposed.  Liberality of mind began to dawn on the darkened ages; no longer were priests supreme.  The gay Provencals began to sing; the universities began to teach and to question.  The Scholastic philosophy sent forth such daring thinkers as Erigena and Abelard.  Orthodoxy was still supreme before such mighty intellects as Anselm, Bernard, and Thomas Aquinas, but it was assailed.  Abelard put forth his puzzling questions.  The Schoolmen began to think for themselves, and the iron weight of Feudalism was less oppressive.  Free cities and commerce began to enrich the people.  Kings were becoming more powerful; the spiritual despotism was less potent.  The end of the world, it was found, had not come.  A glorious future began to shed forth the beams of its coming day.  It was the dawn of a new civilization.

So a lighter, more cheerful, and grander architecture, with symbolic beauties, appeared with changing ideas and sentiments.  The Church, no longer a gloomy power, struggling with Saracens and barbarism, but dominant, triumphant, issues forth from darksome crypts and soars upward,—­elevates her vaulted roofs.  “The Oriental ogive appears. . . .  The architects heap arcade on arcade, ogive on ogive, pyramid on pyramid, and give to all geometrical symmetry and artistic grace. . . .  The Greek column is there, but dilated to colossal proportions, and exfoliated in a variegated capital.”  The old Roman arch disappears, and the pointed arch is substituted,—­graceful and elevated.  The old Egyptian obelisk appears in the spire reaching to heaven, full of aspiration.  The window becomes larger and encroaches on the naked wall, and radiates in mystic roses.  The arches widen and the piers become more lofty.  Stained glass appears and diffuses religious light.  Every part of the church becomes decorated and symbolical and harmonious, though infinitely variegated.  The altars have pictures over them.  Shrines and monuments appear in the niches.  The dresses of the priests are more gorgeous.  The music of the choir peals forth hallelujahs.  Christ is risen from the tomb.  “The purple of his blood colors the windows.”  The roof, like pinnacles and spires, seems to reach the skies.  The pressure of the walls is downwards rather than lateral.  The vertical lines of Cologne are as marked as the old horizontal lines of the Parthenon.  The walls too are not so heavy, and are supported by buttresses, which give increased beauty to the