ated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, the
segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearance
the pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that mystical
figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may be, lastly,
that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches,
so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The last cause may perhaps be
the true one: but it matters little whence the pointed arch came. It
matters much what it meant to those who introduced it. And at the
beginning of the Transition or semi-Norman period, it seems to have meant
nothing. It was not till the thirteenth century that it had gradually
received, as it were, a soul, and had become the exponent of a great
idea. As the Norman architecture and its forms had signified domination,
so the Early English, as we call it, signified aspiration; an idea which
was perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decorated
style.

There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between the
architectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth century. A
vertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom, appears; and
with them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature and art. And here
I ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings of this new era--there
is a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade {304}--and judge for yourselves
whether they, and even more than they the Decorated style into which they
developed, do not remind you of the forest shapes?

And if they remind you: must they not have reminded those who shaped
them? Can it have been otherwise? We know that the men who built were
earnest. The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have given a
subject for some of Mr. Ruskin's noblest chapters, a text for some of his
noblest sermons. We know that they were students of vegetable form. That
is proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the birds, with which they
enwreathed their capitals and enriched their mouldings. Look up there,
and see.

You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the middle
of the fifteenth century, without seeing that leaves and flowers were
perpetually in the workman's mind. Do you fancy that stems and boughs
were never in his mind? He kept, doubtless, in remembrance the
fundamental idea, that the Christian church should symbolise a grot or
cave. He could do no less; while he again and again saw her