lastic tension and communication of force from part to
part; and also a studious expression of this throughout every part of the
building." In a word, Gothic vaulting and tracery have been studiously
made like to boughs of trees. Were those boughs present to the mind of
the architect? Or is the coincidence merely fortuitous? You know
already how I should answer. The cusped arch, too, was it actually not
intended to imitate vegetation? Mr. Ruskin seems to think so. He says
that it is merely the special application to the arch of the great
ornamental system of foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cusped
arch, or complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage. Not
that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, but to be
invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had
discovered in the leaf." Now I differ from Mr. Ruskin with extreme
hesitation. I agree that the cusped arch is not meant to imitate a leaf.
I think with Mr. Ruskin, that it was probably first adopted on account of
its superior strength; and that it afterwards took the form of a bough.
But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last intended to imitate a
bough; a bough of a very common form, and one in which "active rigidity"
is peculiarly shown. I mean a bough which has forked. If the lower fork
has died off, for want of light, we obtain something like the simply
cusped arch. If it be still living--but short and stunted in comparison
with the higher fork--we obtain, it seems to me, something like the
foliated cusp; both likenesses being near enough to those of common
objects to make it possible that those objects may have suggested them.
And thus, more and more boldly, the mediaeval architect learnt to copy
boughs, stems, and, at last, the whole effect, as far always as stone
would allow, of a combination of rock and tree, of grot and grove.

So he formed his minsters, as I believe, upon the model of those leafy
minsters in which he walked to meditate, amid the aisles which God, not
man, has built. He sent their columns aloft like the boles of ancient
trees. He wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with
flowers and creeping shoots. He threw their arches out, and interwove
the groinings of their vaults, like the bough-roofage overhead. He
decked with foliage and fruit the bosses above and the corbels below. He
sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along the walls, in the