turrets rich with carven foliage, as the grey rocks stand out
of the primaeval woods.

That part of the mediaeval builder's task was left unfinished, and indeed
hardly attempted, by our Westminster architects, either under Henry III.,
Edward I., or Henry V.

Their Minster is grand enough by grave height and severe proportion; and
he who enters stooping under that low-browed arch of the north door,
beneath the beetling crag of weatherworn and crumbling stone, may feel
like one who, in some old northern fairy tale, enters a cave in some lone
mountain side where trolls and dragons guard the hoards of buried kings.

And awful it is, and should be still, inside; under that vaulted roof a
hundred feet above, all more mysterious and more huge, and yet more soft,
beneath the murky London air.

But sad I cannot call it. Nor, I think, would you feel it sad, when you
perceive how richly successive architects have squandered on it the
treasures of their fancy; and made it, so they say, perhaps the most
splendid specimen in the world of one of those stone forests, in which
the men of old delighted to reproduce those leafy minsters which God, not
man, has built; where they sent the columns aloft like the boles of giant
trees, and wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with
vines and flowers; and decked with foliage and with fruit the bosses
above and the corbels below; and sent up out of those corbels upright
shafts along the walls, in likeness of the trees which sprang out of the
rocks above their head; and raised those walls into great cliffs; and
pierced those cliffs with the arches of the triforium, as with wild
creatures' caves or hermits' cells; and represented in the horizontal
string-courses and window-sills the strata of the rocks; and opened the
windows into wide and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the
tracery of stems and boughs, through which were seen, not only the outer,
but the upper world. For they craved--as all true artists crave--for
light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, they
might have been content with it, and left their glass transparent. But
in our dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey
mist, were all that they were like to see outside for six months in the
year. So they took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer
moods, and set aloft in their stained glass windows the hues of the
noonday and of the sunset, a