In
them a clear shaft of at least sixty, it may be eighty feet, carries
a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree. In such a grove, I
thought, the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank, worshipped beneath
"trees of God." Such trees, I thought, centuries after, inspired the
genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs.

Thus, at least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells
us, "is a special element of Gothic architecture. Greek and Egyptian
buildings," he says--and I should have added, Roman building also, in
proportion to their age, i.e. to the amount of the Roman elements in
them--"stand for the most part by their own weight and mass, one
stone passively incumbent on another: but in the Gothic vaults and
traceries there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a
limb, or fibres of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of
force from part to part; and also a studious expression of this
throughout every part of the building." In a word, Gothic vaulting
and tracery have been studiously made like to boughs of trees. Were
those boughs present to the mind of the architect? Or is the
coincidence merely fortuitous? You know already how I should answer.
The cusped arch, too, was it actually not intended to imitate
vegetation? Mr. Ruskin seems to think so. He says that it is merely
the special application to the arch of the great ornamental system of
foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cusped arch, or
complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage. Not
that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, "but to be
invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had
discovered in the leaf." Now I differ from Mr. Ruskin with extreme
hesitation. I agree that the cusped arch is not meant to imitate a
leaf. I think with Mr. Ruskin, that it was probably first adopted on
account of its superior strength; and that it afterwards took the
form of a bough. But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last
intended to imitate a bough; a bough of a very common form, and one
in which "active rigidity" is peculiarly shown. I mean a bough which
has forked. If the lower fork has died off, for want of light, we
obtain something like the simply cusped arch. If it be still living-
-but short and stunted in comparison with the higher fork--we obtain,
it seems to me, something like the foliated cusp; both likenesses
being near enough to those of common