ture, which, appearing as a blend of Chinese and
Indian, stands out as the exotic of the Eastern, as does the Gothic of
the Western, world.

Only in these latter two species of architectural art does stone-carving
stand out with that supreme excellence which does not admit of rivalry,
though one be pagan and the other Christian.

Germany, above all other nations of the middle ages in Europe, excelled
in the craftsmanship which fashioned warm, live emotions out of cold
gray stone, and to-day such examples of this as the overpowering and
splendid cathedrals at Cologne, Ratisbon, Strasburg, and Muenster rank
among the greatest and most famous in all the world, in spite of the
fact that their constructive elements were reminiscent of other lands.

The distinction between French and German building cannot better be
described than by quoting the following, the first by James Russell
Lowell on Notre Dame de Chartres, and the second by Longfellow on the
cathedral at Strasburg:

CHARTRES

"Graceful, grotesque, with every new surprise of hazardous caprices sure
to please, heavy as nightmare, airy, light as fun, imagination's very
self in stone."

STRASBURG

"...A great master of his craft,
Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,
For many generations laboured with him,
Children that came to see these saints in stone,
As day by day out of the blocks they rose,
Grew old and died, and still the work went on,
And on and on and is not yet completed."

The first is typical of the ingenuity and genius of the French, the
second of the painstaking labour of the Teuton; what more were needed to
define the two?

"In Germany and throughout all the territory under the spell of Germanic
influence the growth of Gothic was not so readily accomplished as in
France," says Gonse.

"At best such Gothic as is to be seen at Bacharach, Bonn, Worms, etc.,
is but a variety, so far as the vaulting goes, of superimposed details
on a more or less truthful Romanesque framework. At Mayence, Roermond,
and Sinzig, too, it is the domical vault which still qualifies the other
Gothic essentials, and so depreciates the value of the Gothic of the
Rhine valley when compared with that of the Royal Domain of France."

The range of mediaeval art and architecture has been said to run between
the fourth century and the fourteenth, or from the peace of the Church
to the coming of the Renaissance.

This is perhaps definite enou