ll indicate the green withes that tied them.
No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck
with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter,
when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons.
In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of
the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned,
in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles
of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest
overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and
plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust,
elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable
demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal
flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial
proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private
facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and
true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the
slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of
the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never
gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon
for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture
are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa
necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those
whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns.
Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils
of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of
England and America these propensities still fight out the old
battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were
constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the
cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and
to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia
follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the
nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the
gad