mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere
brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and
the storm; and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of
fortune in order to reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while
an inferior man will not pay the price; exactly in like manner a great
mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome
to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of
expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future
pleasure of change. But in all cases it is not that the noble nature
loves monotony, any more than it loves darkness or pain. But it can bear
with it, and receives a high pleasure in the endurance or patience, a
pleasure necessary to the well-being of this world; while those who will
not submit to the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to
another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow
and weariness over the whole world from which there is no more escape.

Sec. XXXVIII. From these general uses of variety in the economy of the
world, we may at once understand its use and abuse in architecture. The
variety of the Gothic schools is the more healthy and beautiful, because
in many cases it is entirely unstudied, and results, not from the mere
love of change, but from practical necessities. For in one point of view
Gothic is not only the best, but the _only rational_ architecture, as
being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or
noble. Undefined in its slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch,
or disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into
a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded
grace and unexhausted energy; and whenever it finds occasion for change
in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of
loss either to its unity or majesty,--subtle and flexible like a fiery
serpent, but ever attentive to the voice of the charmer. And it is one
of the chief virtues of the Gothic builders, that they never suffered
ideas of outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real
use and value of what they did. If they wanted a window, they opened
one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly
regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance,
knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interrupti