]
[Footnote 25: It is thus that we find the most perfect schools of
architecture have arisen in districts whose character is unchanging.
Looking to Egypt first, we find a climate inducing a perpetual state of
heavy feverish excitement, fostered by great magnificence of natural
phenomena, and increased by the general custom of exposing the head
continually to the sun (Herodotus, bk. III. chap. 12); so that, as in a
dreaming fever we imagine distorted creatures and countenances moving
and living in the quiet objects of the chamber, the Egyptian endowed all
existence with distorted animation; turned dogs into deities, and leeks
into lightning-darters; then gradually invested the blank granite with
sculptured mystery, designed in superstition, and adored in disease; and
then such masses of architecture arose as, in delirium, we feel crushing
down upon us with eternal weight, and see extending far into the
blackness above; huge and shapeless columns of colossal life; immense
and immeasurable avenues of mountain stone. This was a perfect--that is,
a marked, enduring, and decided school of architecture, induced by an
unchanging and peculiar character of climate. Then in the purer air, and
among the more refined energies of Greece, architecture rose into a more
studied beauty, equally perfect in its school, because fostered in a
district not 50 miles square, and in its dependent isles and colonies,
all of which were under the same air, and partook of the same features
of landscape.
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