whether any special and pet
fancy of mine should be exactly true or not: but it is not a light matter
that my hearers should be awakened--and too many just now need an actual
awakening--to a right, pure, and wholesome judgment on questions of art,
especially when the soundness of that judgment depends, as in this case,
on sound judgments about human history, as well as about natural objects.

Now, it befel me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with their
forms hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I was
impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of
those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. The
grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those
green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be seen again, make one at
once richer and poorer for the rest of life. The fans of groining sprang
from the short columns, just as do the feathered boughs of the far more
beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just of the same size and shape: and met
overhead, as I have seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than our
cathedral nave. The free upright shafts, which give such strength, and
yet such lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upward
through those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through the
fronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the
infinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the
weight of the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir the
same vision of the Tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not only
resembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I had
ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copied
from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of the
boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded
often enough like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of
parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied
from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the
flatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highest
level of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed at last to
the light-food which they seek, care no longer to grow upward, but spread
out in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding the eye of the
four-centred arch which marks the period of Perpendicular Gothic.

Nay, to this d