uralness,
without any clear notion of what they wanted; and when that notion became
clear, it was too late. Take, as an instance, the tracery of their
windows. It is true, as Mr. Ruskin says, that they began by piercing
holes in a wall of the form of a leaf, which developed, in the rose
window, into the form of a star inside, and of a flower outside. Look at
such aloft there. Then, by introducing mullions and traceries into the
lower part of the window, they added stem and bough forms to those flower
forms. But the two did not fit. Look at the west window of our choir,
and you will see what I mean. The upright mullions break off into bough
curves graceful enough: but these are cut short--as I hold, spoiled--by
circular and triangular forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as such
forms never rest in Nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only half
beautiful. It is fragmentary, unmeaning, barbaric, because unnatural.

They failed, too, it may be, from the very paucity of the vegetable forms
they could find to copy among the flora of this colder clime; and so,
stopped short in drawing from nature, ran off into mere purposeless
luxuriance. Had they been able to add to their stock of memories a
hundred forms which they would have seen in the Tropics, they might have
gone on for centuries copying Nature without exhausting her.

And yet, did they exhaust even the few forms of beauty which they saw
around them? It must be confessed that they did not. I believe that
they could not, because they dared not. The unnaturalness of the creed
which they expressed always hampered them. It forbade them to look
Nature freely and lovingly in the face. It forbade them--as one glaring
example--to know anything truly of the most beautiful of all natural
objects--the human form. They were tempted perpetually to take Nature as
ornament, not as basis; and they yielded at last to the temptation; till,
in the age of Perpendicular architecture, their very ornament became
unnatural again; because conventional, untrue, meaningless.

But the creed for which they worked was dying by that time, and therefore
the art which expressed it must needs die too. And even that death, or
rather the approach of it, was symbolised truly in the flatter roof, the
four-centred arch, the flat-topped tower of the fifteenth-century church.
The creed had ceased to aspire: so did the architecture. It had ceased
to grow: so did the temple. And th