of Germany is as romantic, energetic, and edifying as its poetry at the same epoch. A great German cathedral is a religious epic in stone. All the ornaments, all the episodes, spring from and cluster around one central, life-giving principle. In Italy, on the other hand, the architecture of the so-called Gothic period embodies a constant struggle between the ancient and the new-born mind,--a contest in which the eventual triumph of the elder is already foreshadowed, even while the new has apparently gained the ascendency. Why was this? Because in Italy the German conquerors had invaded the land of ancient culture, of settled and organized form. The world could not be created _de novo_, as in the shaggy deserts of Hercynia and Belgica. The seeds of human speech, planted in those vast wildernesses, sprouted readily into new and luxuriant languages. English, Flemish, German, French spring from German roots hidden in Celtic soil. The Latin element, afterwards engrafted, is exotic, excrescent, and not vital to the organization. In Italy, where a language, a grammar, a literature already existed in full force, the German element was almost neutralized. The Goths could only deface the noble language of Rome. They gave it auxiliary verbs,--that feeblest form of assistance to human eloquence,--and they took away its declensions. Architecture presented the same phenomenon. It submitted to what seemed the German tyranny for a time, but it submitted under a perpetual and visible protest. [Footnote: Compare Kugler, _Kunstgeschichte_, pp. 590, 591.] The Gothic details in the _campanile_ and the _duomo_ look altogether extraneous and compulsory; they are not assimilated into the constitution of the structure. The severe Roman profile is marked as distinctly as ever, notwithstanding the foreign ornaments which it has been forced to assume.