one wilderness of straight smooth shafts, surmounted by a flat sheet
of foliage, held up by boughs like the ribs of a groined roof; while
underneath the ground is bare as a cathedral floor.

You all know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing
by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as
the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its
kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern.

Yet if you look at the same tree, when it has struggled long for life
from its youth amid other trees of its own kind and its own age; you find
that the lower boughs have died off from want of light, leaving not a
scar behind. The upper boughs have reached at once the light, and their
natural term of years. They are content to live, and little more. The
central trunk no longer sends up each year a fresh perpendicular shoot to
aspire above the rest: but as weary of struggling ambition as they are,
is content to become more and more their equal as the years pass by. And
this is a law of social forest trees, which you must bear in mind,
whenever I speak of the influence of tree-forms on Gothic architecture.

Such forms as these are rare enough in Europe now. I never understood
how possible, how common, they must have been in medieval Europe, till I
saw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few oaks like the oak of
Charlemagne, and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose age I dare not guess, but
whose size and shape showed them to have once formed part of a continuous
wood, the like whereof remains not in these isles--perhaps not east of
the Carpathian Mountains. In them a clear shaft of at least sixty, it
may be eighty feet, carries a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree.
In such a grove, I thought, the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank,
worshipped, beneath "trees of God." Such trees, I thought, centuries
after, inspired the genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs.

Thus, at least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells us,
"is a special element of Gothic architecture. Greek and Egyptian
buildings," he says--and I should have added, Roman buildings also, in
proportion to their age, _i.e_., to the amount of the Roman elements in
them--"stand for the most part, by their own weight and mass, one stone
passively incumbent on another: but in the Gothic vaults and traceries
there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb, or fibres
of a tree; an e