likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head. He
raised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced them with the arches of
the triforium, as with hermits' cells. He represented in the horizontal
sills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, the
horizontal strata of the rocks. He opened the windows into high and
lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems and
boughs, through which was seen, not merely the outer, but the upper
world. For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour;
and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been content
with it, and left his glass transparent. But in that dark dank northern
clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey mist, were all that he
was like to see outside for nine months in the year. So he took such
light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his
stained glass windows the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and the
sunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of
the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy;
and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven,
and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that he might
lift up his own eyes and heart for ever out of the dark, dank, sad world
of the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a
realm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of
light; as one who--for he was true to nature, even in that--from between
the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of
gnarled trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and
cottages, and purple mountain ranges, and the far off sea, and the hazy
horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into
an infinite at once of freedom and of repose.

And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of his
church. And how did he shape the outside? Look for yourselves, and
judge. But look: not at Chester, but at Salisbury. Look at those
churches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least pinnacled
towers approaching the pyrmidal form. The outside form of every Gothic
cathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not culminate in
something pyramidal.

The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are
acquainted is the absence--save in a few and unimportant cases--