word,
rightly understood; on the contrary, there is a profound truth, which
the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously recognizes. It is true,
greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and
wild; but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it,
or despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that
it deserves our profoundest reverence.

The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have
thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of
knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable
the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character
which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know the
differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp
which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that
gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not
enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's
surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the
district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the
swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a
moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight,
and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake,
and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an
angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning
field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke,
surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great
peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like
pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop
nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing
softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense,
mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate
with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of
the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass
farther towards the north, until we see the orient colours change
gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of
Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the
Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of
the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky
veils of the