nriches, painting
adorns, works of literature are stored within it, poetry and the drama
awake its echoes, while music thrills to its uttermost recesses, like
the very spirit of life tingling through the body's fibres.

Such being the relation between them, the difference in the nature of
the ideas bodied forth in music and in architecture becomes apparent.
Music is interior, abstract, subjective, speaking directly to the soul
in a simple and universal language whose meaning is made personal and
particular in the breast of each listener: "Music alone of all the
arts," says Balzac, "has power to make us live within ourselves."
A work of architecture is the exact opposite of this: existing
principally and primarily for the uses of the body, it is like the
body a concrete organism, attaining to esthetic expression only in
the reconciliation and fulfilment of many conflicting practical
requirements. Music is pure beauty, the voice of the unfettered
and perpetually vanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul
imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of causality, beaten
upon by the elements, at war with gravity, the slave of man. One is
the Ariel of the arts; the other, Caliban.

Coming now to the consideration of architecture in its historical
rather than its philosophical aspect, it will be shown how certain
theosophical concepts are applicable here. Of these none is more
familiar and none more fundamental than the idea of reincarnation. By
reincarnation more than mere physical re-birth is meant, for physical
re-birth is but a single manifestation of that universal law of
alternation of state, of animation of vehicles, and progression
through related planes, in accordance with which all things move,
and as it were make music--each cycle complete, yet part of a larger
cycle, the incarnate monad passing through correlated changes,
carrying along and bringing into manifestation in each successive arc
of the spiral the experience accumulated in all preceding states,
and at the same time unfolding that power of the Self peculiar to the
plane in which it is momentarily manifesting.

This law finds exemplification in the history of architecture in the
orderly flow of the building impulse from one nation and one country
to a different nation and a different country: its new vehicle of
manifestation; also in the continuity and increasing complexity of
the development of that impulse in manifestation; each "incarnat