Egyptian architecture, with its predominantly mathematical character, and the tree-like Gothic aspiring to heaven, with its slender shafts and floral decorations, form the two extremes of this organic character which belongs to architecture, and which constitutes it one and the same art with sculpture. For the structures of the former environ and surround the creations of the latter. And it is only consistent that that which supplies the legitimate sphere and the natural medium for the other properly exhibitive art of sculpture and its statues of the gods, should even possess or acquire a similarity of character with it. As to the Egyptian and Gothic architectures, the remark readily suggests itself that the symbolical character displays itself predominantly in them: purity of form, however, is the prevalent feature of the _antique_ (or Grecian), but even here in its proportions the symbolical principle may be traced, although it is more recondite, not to say concealed. Even poetry is no fourth art alongside of the other three. It does not stand on the same line with and form, as it were, the complement of their number. It is rather the universal symbolical art which comprises and combines in different mediums all those other exhibitive arts of the beautiful. In its rhythm and other metrical aids it possesses all the charms of a music in words; in its figurative diction it maintains an endless succession of shifting pictures in the vivid coloring of diversified illustration; while in its entire structure (which must be neither purely historical, nor logical, or even rhetorical) it strives to attain, by a beautiful organic development and disposition of its parts, to an arrangement of the whole both architecturally great and correct. Poetry owes in every instance its first creative beginning to some great and singular ray of light from symbolical tradition, which, at the same time, illuminates the noble and memorable past, and points forward to the dark and mystical future. For it would be difficult to produce one among the great epic poems of antiquity that does not contain this poetico-prophetic element, and does not touch upon the profound mysteries of both worlds. The next and middle step is occupied by the poetry of sentiment and feeling--that music of the soul or poesy of song in which the calm deep longings and the wild tearing passions of the moment, once plunged and glorified in that immortal element, become eternal. But the height of perfection in the organic development of poetry is marked by the drama. This third and highest form of poetical art has for its subject-matter the whole struggle of human life, which in its vivid representations it aims to realize, and, as it were, to bring bodily before our eyes.