ay there is one point in our cathedral which, to me, keeps
up the illusion still. As I enter the choir, and look upward toward the
left, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the stalls, the
slender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the delicate second growth
which, as it were, rushes upward from the earth wherever the forest is
cleared; and above it, in the tall lines of the north-west pier of the
tower--even though defaced, along the inner face of the western arch, by
ugly and needless perpendicular panelling--I seem to see the stems of
huge Cedars, or Balatas, or Ceibas, curving over, as they would do, into
the great beams of the transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground.

Nay, so far will the fancy lead, that I have seemed to see, in the
stained glass between the tracery of the windows, such gorgeous sheets of
colour as sometimes flash on the eye, when, far aloft, between high stems
and boughs, you catch sight of some great tree ablaze with flowers,
either its own or those of a parasite; yellow or crimson, white or
purple; and over them again the cloudless blue.

Now, I know well that all these dreams are dreams; that the men who built
our northern cathedrals never saw these forest forms; and that the
likeness of their work to those of Tropic nature is at most only a
corroboration of Mr. Ruskin's dictum, that "the Gothic did not arise out
of, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation. . . . It was
no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough,
but the gradual and continual discovery of a beauty in natural forms
which could be more and more transferred into those of stone, which
influenced at once the hearts of the people and the form of the edifice."
So true is this, that by a pure and noble copying of the vegetable beauty
which they had seen in their own clime, the medieval craftsmen went so
far--as I have shown you--as to anticipate forms of vegetable beauty
peculiar to Tropic climes, which they had not seen: a fresh proof, if
proof were needed, that beauty is something absolute and independent of
man; and not, as some think, only relative, and what happens to be
pleasant to the eye of this man or that.

But thinking over this matter, and reading over, too, that which Mr.
Ruskin has written thereon in his 'Stones of Venice,' vol. ii. cap. vi.,
on the nature of Gothic, I came to certain further conclusions--or at
least surmises--which I put before you