of the
pyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk:
but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their buildings are flat-
topped. Their builders were contented with the earth as it was. There
was a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny. But
religions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a noble self-
discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward and aspiring form
of building. It is not merely that, fancying heaven to be above earth,
they point towards heaven. There is a deeper natural language in the
pyramidal form of a growing tree. It symbolises growth, or the desire of
growth. The Norman tower does nothing of the kind. It does not aspire
to grow. Look--I mention an instance with which I am most familiar--at
the Norman tower of Bury St. Edmund's. It is graceful--awful, if you
will--but there is no aspiration in it. It is stately: but self-content.
Its horizontal courses; circular arches; above all, its flat sky-line,
seem to have risen enough: and wish to rise no higher. For it has no
touch of that unrest of soul, which is expressed by the spire, and still
more by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials, which
are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really terminal
buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as the crockets
are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.

You feel, surely, the truth of these last words. You cannot look at the
canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that
they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves
are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look at the
tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine
forests which clothe the Hampshire moors. But if the details are copied
from vegetable forms, why not the whole? Is not a spire like a growing
tree, a tabernacle like a fir-tree, a compound spire like a group of
firs? And if we can see that: do you fancy that the man who planned the
spire did not see it as clearly as we do; and perhaps more clearly still?

I am aware, of course, that Norman architecture had sometimes its
pinnacle, a mere conical or polygonal capping. I am aware that this
form, only more and more slender, lasted on in England during the
thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth century; and on the
Continent, under many modifications, one En