gland. But they are so common through all the rest of
Europe, that not only would the form suggest itself to a Continental
architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all did who could,
across the Alps to Rome. The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, like
the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging to
the hill-side and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorl
above whorl--for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward in
the spring; and now and then a whole bough, breaking away, as it were,
into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire on
the same tree--this surely was the form which the mediaeval architect
seized, to clothe with it the sides and roof of the stone mountain which
he had built; piling up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the
angles; that, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of
the building might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea
culminated in that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be
completed, will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs,
surmounted by three enormous pines.

One feature of the Norman temple he could keep; for it was copied from
the same nature which he was trying to copy--namely, the high-pitched
roof and gables. Mr. Ruskin lays it down as a law, that the acute angle
in roofs, gables, spires, is the distinguishing mark of northern Gothic.
It was adopted, most probably, at first from domestic buildings. A
northern house or barn must have a high-pitched roof: or the snow will
not slip off it. But that fact was not discovered by man; it was copied
by him from the rocks around. He saw the mountain peak jut black and
bare above the snows of winter; he saw those snows slip down in sheets,
rush down in torrents under the sun, from the steep slabs of rock which
coped the hill-side; and he copied, in his roofs, the rocks above his
town. But as the love for decoration arose, he would deck his roofs as
nature had decked hers, till the grey sheets of the cathedral slates
should stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the
grey mountain sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and towering
pine.

He failed, though he failed nobly. He never succeeded in attaining a
perfectly natural style.

The medieval architects were crippled to the last by the tradition of
artificial Roman forms. They began improving them into nat