tride. You cannot but love them for their strangeness and the surprise
they make against the quiet sky. In Britain, too, you might have beheld
this tendency, where the lordly curfew quenched the lights in castle and
cot from beneath a very extinguisher of a roof. Now, as, in the natural
growth of the human mind, the heart became more and more impregnated
with the beauty of holiness, and the prayers of men ascended with
somewhat of purer aspiration to heaven, so did they build their
tower-roofs higher and higher into the air, till at length the spire was
born. In one of those quaint antique towers of Normandy, Coutances, it
was first fully developed; and it is curious to see how in this
instance its roof-origin was still remembered: for it has tall, gabled
garret-windows rising from its base, connected by rude cross-bars to the
slope of the spire; and it has a kind of scaly mail, Ruskin says, which
is nothing more than the copying in stone of the common wooden shingles
of the house-roof. Now the proud Italian architects, disdainful though
they were of the arts of the rude Northern builders, could not but admit
the expressiveness of the pointed roof; so they placed a form of it on
some of their campaniles, as on those of Venice and Cremona, in both
these instances making it a third of the whole height. But the spire,
though an effective, was as yet an unambitious structure,--scarcely more
than an exaltation or an apotheosis of the roof. For a long time it
continued to be merely a supplementary addition in wood to the solid
masonry of the tower, and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
centuries was often added to substructures of the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth.

Surely it is very dull in us, out of our present enlightenment, to
continue to distinguish the mediaeval times as the _Dark_ Ages, as if
they were glimmering and ghostly, and men groped about in them blindly,
living in a sort of dusky romance of feudality. Did you ever study De
la Roche's incarnation of Mediaeval Art in his Hemicycle,--that long
saintly robe with its still and serious folds, that fair dreamy face,
those upturned eyes, "the homes of silent prayer," the contemplative
repose? It is truly an exquisite idealization; yet there is something
wanting. I believe the piety of those days was rather a passion than a
sentiment. Their "beauty of holiness" was rather an active emotional
impulse than a passive spiritualization, and was incomplete without