o tall or commanding object in nature. It is
merely the caricature of one--it may be of the mountain-peak. The
outline must be broken, must be softened, before it can express the
soul of a creed which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, far
more than now, was one of penitence as well as of aspiration, of
passionate emotion as well as of lofty faith. But a shape which will
express that soul must be sought, not among mineral, but among
vegetable, forms. And remember always, if we feel thus even now, how
much more must those medieval men of genius have felt thus, whose
work we now dare only copy line by line?

So--as it seems to me--they sought among vegetable forms for what
they needed: and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the
fir--the spruce and silver firs of their own forests. They are not,
of course, indigenous to England. But they are so common through all
the rest of Europe, that not only would the form suggest itself to a
continental architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all
did who could, across the Alps to Rome. The fir-tree, not growing on
level ground, like the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of
foliage, but clinging to the hillside and the crag, old above young,
spire above spire, whorl above whorl--for the young shoots of each
whorl of boughs point upward in the spring; and now and then a whole
bough breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward
altogether, and forms a secondary spire on the same tree--this surely
was the form which the medieval architect seized, to clothe with it
the sides and roof of the stone mountain which he had built; piling
up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the angles; that, like a
group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building
might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea culminated in
that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be completed,
will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs,
surrounded by three enormous pines.

One feature of the Norman temple he could keep; for it was copied
from the same Nature which he was trying to copy--namely, the high-
pitched roof and gables. Mr. Ruskin lays it down as a law, that the
acute angle in roofs, gables, spires, is the distinguishing mark of
northern Gothic. It was adopted, most probably, at first from
domestic buildings. A northern house or barn must have a high-
pitched roof, or the snow will not slip off it.