ng in the
forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if
the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had
passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the
fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who
has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been
present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I
remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out to me
a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to
the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over
churches,--a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched
symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often,
and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have
seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me
that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in
the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone
wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to
abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew
the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people
merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the
semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese
pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still
betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. "The
custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren
in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the
principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal
form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the
eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when
art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat
porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before
which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the
interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest
trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the bands
about the cleft pillars sti