The column is very dear to you, and in another clime you would be prophet. You say: The column is the first essential ingredient of a building, and the most beautiful. What noble elegance of form, what pure grandeur, when they are placed in a row! Only guard against using them inappropriately; it is their nature to be free and detached. Alas for the unfortunates who try to join the slender shape of them to heavy walls! Yet it seems to me, dear abbé, that the frequent repetition of this impropriety of building columns into walls, so that the moderns have even stuffed the inter-columnia of ancient temples with masonry, might have aroused in your mind some reflections. If your ears were not deaf to the truth, these stones would have preached a sermon to you. Columns are in no way an ingredient in our dwellings; they contradict rather the style of all our buildings. Our houses have not their origin in four columns placed in four corners. They are built out of four walls on four sides, which take the place of columns, indeed exclude all columns, and where these are used to patch up, they are an encumbrance and a superfluity. This is true of our palaces and churches, with the exception of a few cases, which I do not need to mention. Thus your buildings exhibit mere surface, which, the broader it is extended,--the higher it is raised to the sky,--the more unendurable must become the monotony which oppresses the soul. But Genius came to our aid, and said to Erwin von Steinbach: Diversify the huge wall, which you are to raise heavenward, so that it may soar like a lofty, far-spreading tree of God, which with a thousand branches, millions of twigs, and leaves like the sand of the sea, proclaims everywhere the glory of God, its Master. * * * * * When I went for the first time to the Minster, my head was full of the common cant of “good taste.” From hearsay, I was an admirer of the harmony of mass, the purity of form, and was a sworn enemy to the confused arbitrariness of Gothic adornment. Under the term, “Gothic,” like the article in a dictionary, I piled all the misconceptions which had ever come into my head, of the indefinite, the unregulated, the unnatural, the patched-up, the strung-together, the superfluous, in art. No wiser than a people which calls the whole foreign world, “barbarous,” everything was Gothic to me that did not fit into my system, from the turned wooden dolls and pictures of gay colors, with which the bourgeois nobility decorate their houses, to the dignified relics of the older German architecture, my opinion of which, because of some bizarre scrollwork, had been that of everybody,--“Quite buried in ornamentation!”; consequently I had an aversion to seeing it, such as I would have before a malformed bristling monster.