the black shade of gnarled trees,
catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and cottages, and
purple mountain ranges, and the far-off sea, and the hazy horizon
melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into an
infinite at once of freedom and of repose.

And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of his
church. And how did he shape the outside? Look for yourselves, and
judge. But look, not at Chester, but at Salisbury. Look at those
churches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least
pinnacled towers approaching the pyramidal form. The outside form of
every Gothic cathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not
culminate in something pyramidal.

The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are
acquainted is the absence--save in a few and unimportant cases--of
the pyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the
obelisk; but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their
buildings are flat-topped. Their builders were contented with the
earth as it was. There was a great truth involved in that; which I
am the last to deny.

But religions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a
noble self-discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward
and aspiring form of building. It is not merely that, fancying
heaven to be above earth, they point towards heaven. There is a
deeper natural language in the pyramidal form of a growing tree. It
symbolises growth, or the desire of growth. The Norman tower does
nothing of the kind. It does not aspire to grow. Look--I mention an
instance with which I am most familiar--at the Norman tower of Bury
St. Edmund's. It is graceful--awful, if you will--but there is no
aspiration in it. It is stately, but self-content. Its horizontal
courses, circular arches, above all, its flat sky-line, seem to have
risen enough, and wish to rise no higher. For it has no touch of
that unrest of soul which is expressed by the spire, and still more
by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials--which
are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really
terminal buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as
the crockets are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.

You feel, surely, the truth of these last words. You cannot look at
the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing
that they do not merely suggest bu