emphasis or volume, but by a sort
of blessed infection too subtile and too potent for words to convey.
Volubility strangles it; and it is felt to be insincere when it grows
loquacious. A wordy grief is merely a grief from the throat outwards;
"the grief that does not speak," this it is that "whispers the
o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." And the truly eloquent speaker
or writer is not he who says a multitude of fine things in finely
turned language and figures, which is very easily done, but he who
says just the right things, and says them in the fewest, simplest, and
aptest words. As for the speaker who lives, not in the inspiration of
his theme, but in the display of his eloquence, we may rest assured
that he will never say any thing worth hearing: his work will
naturally turn all to mere elocution; which may be described as the
art of pronouncing nothing in such a way as to make it pass for
something grand.

Thus there appears to be a profound natural sympathy or affinity
between the forces of religion and the forms of Art. Therefore it is
that the higher efficacies of Christian culture and the deeper
workings of religious thought and emotion have instinctively sought to
organize and enshrine themselves in artistic creations; no other mode
or power of expression being strong enough to hold them, or inclusive
enough to contain them. It is in such works as the ancient marvels of
ecclesiastical building that the Christian mind has found its most
fitting and most operative eloquence.

What was the motive-principle, what the inspiring power, of those
architectural wonders that transport the impress of mediaeval piety
across the ocean of so many centuries? Wordsworth, referring to some
of the English cathedrals, says,--

"They dreamt not of a perishable home,
Who thus could build."

And, sure enough, we may well deem that nothing less than the most
intense and burning conceptions of eternity could have inspired the
souls of men and made them strong enough to project and accomplish
those stupendous structures which, in their silent majesty and
awe-inspiring suggestiveness, are the most persuasive and the most
unanswerable preachers of Christianity that the Church of two thousand
years has produced. "They builded better than they knew." And what are
all the sermons and theologies of that time in comparison with those
great old monuments of Christian Art? "The immortal mind craves
objects that endure." And