glish kind whereof is usually
called a "broach," of which you have a beautiful specimen in the new
church at Hoole.

Now, no one will deny that that broach is beautiful. But it would be
difficult to prove that its form was taken from a North European tree.
The cypress was unknown, probably, to our northern architects. The
Lombardy poplar--which has wandered hither, I know not when, all the way
from Cashmere--had not wandered then, I believe, further than North
Italy. The form is rather that of mere stone; of the obelisk, or of the
mountain peak; and they, in fact, may have at first suggested the spire.
The grandeur of an isolated mountain, even of a dolmen or single upright
stone, is evident to all.

But it is the grandeur, not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the
Christian; not even of the Stoic: but rather of the Epicurean. It says--I
cannot rise. I do not care to rise. I will be contentedly and valiantly
that which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them.
But it is defiance under defeat. The mountain-peak does not grow, but
only decays. Fretted by rains, peeled by frost, splintered by lightning,
it must down at last; and crumble into earth, were it as old, as hard, as
lofty as the Matterhorn itself. And while it stands, it wants not only
aspiration, it wants tenderness; it wants humility; it wants the unrest
which tenderness and humility must breed, and which Mr. Ruskin so clearly
recognises in the best Gothic art. And, meanwhile, it wants naturalness.
The mere smooth spire or broach--I had almost said, even the spire of
Salisbury--is like no tall or commanding object in Nature. It is merely
the caricature of one; it may be of the mountain-peak. The outline must
be broken, must be softened, before it can express the soul of a creed
which, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries far more than now, was
one of penitence as well as of aspiration, of passionate emotion as well
as of lofty faith. But a shape which will express that soul must be
sought, not among mineral, but among vegetable, forms. And remember
always, if we feel thus even now, how much more must those medieval men
of genius have felt thus, whose work we now dare only copy line by line?

So--as it seems to me--they sought among vegetable forms for what they
needed: and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the fir,--the
spruce and silver firs of their own forests. They are not, of course,
indigenous to En