“Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
    Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
    And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.”

The whole of animate creation labours under the beautiful necessity of being beautiful.  Everywhere it exhibits a perfect utility subservient to harmonious laws.  Nature is the workshop in which are built beautiful organisms.  This is exactly the aim of the architect—­to fashion beautiful organisms; what better school, therefore, could he have in which to learn his trade?

To study Nature it is not necessary to go out into the fields and botanize, nor to attempt to make water colours of picturesque scenery.  These things are very well, but not so profitable to your particular purpose as observation directed toward the discovery of the laws which underlie and determine form and structure, such as the tracing of the spiral line, not alone where it is obvious, as in the snail’s shell and in the ram’s horn, but where it appears obscurely, as in the disposition of leaves or twigs upon a parent stem.  Such laws of nature are equally laws of art, for art is nature carried to a higher power by reason of its passage through a human consciousness.  Thought and emotion tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably, and according to the same laws, as does the frost on the window pane.  Art, in one of its aspects, is the weaving of a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to lines, forms, colors, sounds.  All very poetical, and possibly true, you may be saying to yourselves, but what has it to do with architecture, which nowadays, at least, is pre-eminently a practical and utilitarian art whose highest mission is to fulfil definite conditions in an economical and admirable way; whose supreme excellence is fitness, appropriateness, the perfect adaptation of means to ends, and the apt expression of both means and ends?  Yes, architecture is all of this, but this is not all of architecture; else the most efficient engineer would be the most admirable architect, which does not happen to be the case.  Along with the expression of the concrete and individual must go the expression of the abstract and universal; the two can be combined in a single building in the same way that in every human countenance are combined a racial or temperamental type, which is universal, and a character, which is individual.  The expression of any sort of cosmic truth, of universal harmony and rhythm, is the quality which our architecture most conspicuously lacks.  Failing to find the cosmic truth within ourselves, failing to vibrate to the universal harmony and rhythm, our architecture is—­well, what it is, for only that which is native to our living spirit can we show forth in the work of our hands.