This softened line, this line full of life, is one of the chief characteristics of the Gothic. The sky of our northern climates ordained it so, for the architects of the Middle Ages carved their monuments out of doors. Once the general plan was established, they easily found the details while working with their tools, guided by the light and influenced by natural conditions. Our light is not that of Greece. Humanity the world over is akin; but to what the Greek expressed in a chastened manner, in keeping with his eternally pure light, we have added the oblique slant of our sun, our reality, our country, our autumns, the sting of our winters, our less definite spirit, our remoteness from the glaring Olympian sun; and, last of all, we have added our trees. We also have light, but it is frequently obscured by passing clouds. Is it not natural that we should reproduce them in our art? And the line, the abundant line, is more accentuated in the half-night of our long autumns. Thus we are more in the mood of our woods and our forests. Our souls have more shadows than the Greek soul, our determinations are more varied; for our clouds and our forests are reflected in our hearts. Artists, let us, then, revert to the interpretation of our race, but in the spirit, not in the letter. Let us copy only the soul of our external nature, not its Gothic form, for a mere copy is cold and dead. Beautiful architecture is a reproduction by man, but from a divine model. From this it receives the warmth of life. If architecture is true to the spirit of nature, it is embraced by the trees, the rocks, the clouds; they are the silent company of beauty. O Cathedral! Sphinx of Northern life! although mutilated, are you not eternal? Do you cease to live? From a distance, and in the evening, when dusk sets in, you seem truly a great sphinx crouching in the country. The drama that unfolds itself on the stone pages of the churches recalls to us with a very few gestures and movements the silent drama of antiquity, the sculptures, illustrations of Æschylus and Sophocles.