ret, Belfry, Spire, Tower, a pleasant sound in
all your ears? I do not speak of your scenery, I do not ask you how much
you feel that it owes to the gray battlements that frown through the
woods of Craigmillar, to the pointed turrets that flank the front of
Holyrood, or to the massy keeps of your Crichtoun and Borthwick and
other border towers. But look merely through your poetry and romances;
take away out of your border ballads the word _tower_ wherever it
occurs, and the ideas connected with it, and what will become of the
ballads? See how Sir Walter Scott cannot even get through a description
of Highland scenery without help from the idea:--

"Each purple peak, each flinty _spire_,
Was bathed in floods of living fire."

Take away from Scott's romances the word and idea _turret_, and see how
much you would lose. Suppose, for instance, when young Osbaldistone is
leaving Osbaldistone Hall, instead of saying "The old clock struck two
from a _turret_ adjoining my bedchamber," he had said, "The old clock
struck two from the landing at the top of the stair," what would become
of the passage? And can you really suppose that what has so much power
over you in words has no power over you in reality? Do you think there
is any group of words which would thus interest you, when the things
expressed by them are uninteresting?

[Footnote 11: Among the various modes in which the architects, against
whose practice my writings are directed, have endeavored to oppose them,
no charge has been made more frequently than that of their
self-contradiction; the fact being, that there are few people in the
world who are capable of seeing the two sides of any subject, or of
conceiving how the statements of its opposite aspects can possibly be
reconcilable. For instance, in a recent review, though for the most part
both fair and intelligent, it is remarked, on this very subject of the
domestic origin of the northern Gothic, that "Mr. Ruskin is evidently
possessed by a fixed idea, that the Venetian architects were devout men,
and that their devotion was expressed in their buildings; while he will
not allow our own cathedrals to have been built by any but worldly men,
who had no thoughts of heaven, but only vague ideas of keeping out of
hell, by erecting costly places of worship." If this writer had compared
the two passages with the care which such a subject necessarily demands,
he would have found that I was not opposing Venetian to E