All that the age had just cause for pride in--its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible--came to a head in the Brooklyn Bridge. What was grotesque and barbarous in industrialism was sloughed off in the great bridges. These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, the only enduring monuments that witness a period of uneasy industrial transition; and to this day they communicate a feeling of dignity, stability, and unwavering poise. The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1884; Richardson died, after finishing the Pittsburgh Court House, in 1886. There was a short period during which the echoes of Richardson’s style resounded in the work of the Western architects; and then in New York two of Richardson’s own pupils, Messrs. McKim and White, who had caught the spirit of the period that was to follow the passing of the frontier, prepared an appropriate mold for its activities. By far the finest things in the late ’eighties are the shingled houses which Richardson and Stanford White and a few others developed for seaboard estates: they recovered the spirit of the early vernacular work, and continued the colonial tradition without even faintly recalling colonial forms. This new note, however, was scarcely sounded before it died out; and in the twenty years that followed the conflict between industrialism and romanticism was swallowed up and finally forgotten in the rise of a new mode. Richardson had not died too soon. The quality of mind and culture which shines through his work was opposed to nearly every manifestation of the period that succeeded him. From this time on, romanticism retained a place for itself only by forfeiting its claims to occupy the whole province of architecture. In churches and college halls where the traditional tie with the Middle Ages had never perhaps been completely broken, its triumphs have been genuine; but although Mr. J. G. Rogers’ Harkness Memorial at Yale, or Messrs. Goodhue and Cram’s St. Thomas’ Church, for example, leave little to be desired in themselves, they have established no precedent for the hundred other kinds of building which the modern community requires; and it is not without significance that in his most recent efforts Mr. Goodhue, for one, had abandoned the molds of romanticism. Unlike Richardson, the surviving romanticists now demand a certain insulation from the modern world; the more intelligent exponents of the movement believe with Dr. Ralph Adams Cram that there is no hope for its achievement throughout the community without a return to “Walled Towns.”