Do you think that such a work as this tells us
no more than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed
their present form, and court was added to court, and libraries and
museums and lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed
by the professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by
the masons and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.
Horizons rich with trembling spires
On violet twilights, lose their fires
if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The
authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else
that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great
national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and
crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the
marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the
questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out
of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the
painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone
through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of
six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you
must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains,
and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the
other.
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