For thousands of years the great mountain chains of mid-Europe cut off the man in the North from the man in the South, as completely as the barren steppes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia divided East from West. To this very day the long winters and cool summers, the sombre skies and deep forests, have operated to produce a body of thought and emotion in the North of Europe that differs entirely from that nourished under the clear skies and in the warm winds of Italy and Greece. The mysticism of the Northman, his yearning to be at one with the Ultimate Reality, is foreign to the typical Southern intellect—as foreign as the dim forests, in which the mystical gloom of the Northern imagination arose, are to the fruitful plains in which the sunnier creed of the Southerner had its birth. These general considerations prepare the way naturally enough for a review of the history of sculpture in Northern Europe. Hitherto we have considered the progress of the art in Italy and Greece. The sunny human creed of the Southern temperament, at any rate, was able to find full expression in marble and bronze. Can we say as much for the mystical philosophy of such countries as Germany, France, Holland and England? The influence of the prevailing trend of thought can be clearly traced in several northern arts—in architecture and music, for instance—or, again, in a Rembrandt portrait. Surely this is as typical a product of the northern imagination, with its mysticism and gloom, as a picture by Botticelli or Correggio, with its wealth of fancy and its delight in light and space, is of the southern temperament. But, turning to the work of the northern sculptors, we cannot say this. The deepest emotions of the northern artist have found more natural expression in the drama, in poetry, music and painting. The reason is not far to seek. All these arts are far more universal in their range. Sculpture depends entirely upon so human a thing as the body of a man or a woman. It is naturally more fitted for the exposition of a creed in which mankind occupies the chief place. Equally naturally, the other arts serve better for the unfolding of a belief which bases everything upon the will of an extra-mundane God, manifesting Himself not in man alone but in the whole of the natural world. Be that as it may, it is certain that when we turn to the sculpture of the North, we find few traces of the mystical outlook upon life which is implicit in other northern art. By the time the sculptors of the North had acquired the technical skill to express their thought and emotion they apparently found themselves unable to embody their deepest belief in their works. This, no doubt, explains why sculpture has never been a popular art in any Northern country, why it has never occupied the place there which it did in Greece or Rome; why it has always been a stranger art, making its appeal to the few and not to the many.