y,
and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble,
without effort, without reaction,--following a natural and tranquil
law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation
which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large
volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive
engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man,
the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which
lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and
totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.

Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture of
Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient,
it appears to the eyes as an immense formation divided into three
well-defined zones, which are superposed, the one upon the other: the
Romanesque zone*, the Gothic zone, the zone of the Renaissance, which
we would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone. The Roman layer, which is
the most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which
reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern and upper layer
of the Renaissance. The pointed arch is found between the two. The
edifices which belong exclusively to any one of these three layers
are perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of
Jumieges, there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of
Orleans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the edges, like
the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence, complex monuments, edifices
of gradation and transition. One is Roman at the base, Gothic in the
middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is because it was six hundred years
in building. This variety is rare. The donjon keep of d'Etampes is a
specimen of it. But monuments of two formations are more frequent. There
is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by
its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal of
Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Pres. There is the
charming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Roman
layer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen, which would
be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its central spire in
the zone of the Renaissance.**

* This is the same which is called, according to locality,
climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine. There are four sister