Welcome, to you, young man, who have been born with a keen eye for form and proportion, with the facility to practise in all forms. If then there awakes gradually in you the joy of life, and you come to feel the rapture which men know after work, fear and hope,--the spirited cries of the laborer in the vineyard when the bounty of the harvest swells his vats, the lively dance of the reaper when he has hung his idle sickle high on the beam,--when all the powerful nerves of desire and suffering live again more manfully in your brush, and you have striven and suffered enough and have enjoyed enough, and are filled with earthly beauty, and worthy to rest in the arms of the goddess, worthy to feel on her bosom what gave new birth to the deified Hercules--then receive him, heavenly beauty, thou mediator between gods and men, and let him, more than Prometheus, carry down the rapture of the gods to the earth.[2] FOOTNOTES: [1] Erwin von Steinbach, one of the architects of the Strassburg Cathedral. [2] “What I had thought and imagined with respect to that style of architecture, I wrote in a connected form. The first point on which I insisted was that it should be called German, and not Gothic; that it should be considered not foreign, but native. The second point was that it could not be compared with the architecture of the Greeks and Romans, because it sprang from quite another principle. If these, living under a more favorable sky, allowed their roof to rest upon columns, a wall, broken through, arose of its own accord. We, however, who must always protect ourselves against the weather, and everywhere surround ourselves with walls, have to revere the genius who discovered the means of endowing massive walls with variety, of apparently breaking them through, and of thus occupying the eye in a worthy and pleasing manner on a broad surface.... If I had been pleased to write down these views (the value of which I will not deny) clearly and distinctly, in an intelligible style, the paper _On German Architecture_ would then, when I published it, have produced more effect, and would sooner have drawn the attention of the native friends of art. But, misled by the example of Herder and Hamann, I obscured these very simple thoughts and observations by a dusty cloud of words and phrases, and, both for myself and others, darkened the light which had arisen within me. However, the paper was well received, and reprinted in Herder’s work on _German Manner and Art_.”--Goethe, _Autobiography_ (1812). The “dear abbé” to whom Goethe is replying in this essay is the Abbé Laugier, author of the _Essai sur l’Architecture_ (1753). INTRODUCTION TO THE _PROPYLÆA_ (1798) There is no more striking sign of the decay of art than when we find its separate provinces mixed up together.