For a long time it
continued to be merely a supplementary addition in wood to the solid
masonry of the tower, and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
centuries was often added to substructures of the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth.
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.
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