arks another school of architecture, but because
they are the only organic structures which are capable of being so
treated, and intended to be so, without strong effort of imagination. To
pull animals to pieces, and use their paws for feet of furniture, or
their heads for terminations of rods and shafts, is _usually_ the
characteristic of feelingless schools; the greatest men like their
animals whole. The head may, indeed, be so managed as to look emergent
from the stone, rather than fastened to it; and wherever there is
throughout the architecture any expression of sternness or severity
(severity in its literal sense, as in Romans, XI. 22), such divisions of
the living form may be permitted; still, you cannot cut an animal to
pieces as you can gather a flower or a leaf. These were intended for our
gathering, and for our constant delight: wherever men exist in a
perfectly civilised and healthy state, they have vegetation around them;
wherever their state approaches that of innocence or perfectness, it
approaches that of Paradise,--it is a dressing of garden. And,
therefore, where nothing else can be used for ornament, vegetation may;
vegetation in any form, however fragmentary, however abstracted. A
single leaf laid upon the angle of a stone, or the mere form or
frame-work of the leaf drawn upon it, or the mere shadow and ghost of
the leaf,--the hollow "foil" cut out of it,--possesses a charm which
nothing else can replace; a charm not exciting, nor demanding laborious
thought or sympathy, but perfectly simple, peaceful, and satisfying.

Sec. XXXIII. The full recognition of leaf forms, as the general source of
subordinate decoration, is one of the chief characteristics of Christian
architecture; but the two _roots_ of leaf ornament are the Greek
acanthus, and the Egyptian lotus.[68] The dry land and the river thus
each contributed their part; and all the florid capitals of the richest
Northern Gothic on the one hand, and the arrowy lines of the severe
Lombardic capitals on the other, are founded on these two gifts of the
dust of Greece and the waves of the Nile. The leaf which is, I believe,
called the Persepolitan water-leaf, is to be associated with the lotus
flower and stem, as the origin of our noblest types of simple capital;
and it is to be noted that the florid leaves of the dry land are used
most by the Northern architects, while the water leaves are gathered for
their ornaments by the parched builders of the De