copied from the fluted stems beneath which I
had ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed
copied from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring
of the boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were
garlanded often enough, like the capitals of the columns, with
delicate tracery of parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the
arches seemed copied from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo
shoots; and even the flatter roof of the nave and transepts had its
antitype in that highest level of the forest aisles where the trees,
having climbed at last to the light-food which they seek, care no
longer to grow upward, but spread out in huge limbs, almost
horizontal, reminding the eye of the four-centred arch which marks
the period of perpendicular Gothic.

Nay, to this day there is one point in our cathedral which, to me,
keeps up the illusion still. As I enter the choir, and look upward
toward the left, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the
stalls, the slender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the
delicate second growth which, as it were, rushes upward from the
earth wherever the forest is cleared; and above it, in the tall lines
of the north-west pier of the tower--even though defaced, along the
inner face of the western arch, by ugly and needless perpendicular
panelling--I seem to see the stems of huge cedars, or balatas, or
ceibas, curving over, as they would do, into the great beams of the
transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground.

Nay, so far will the fancy lead, that I have seemed to see, in the
stained glass between the tracery of the windows, such gorgeous
sheets of colour as sometimes flash on the eye, when, far aloft,
between high stems and boughs, you catch sight of some great tree
ablaze with flowers, either its own or those of a parasite; yellow or
crimson, white or purple; and over them again the cloudless blue.

Now, I know well that all these dreams are dreams; that the men who
built our northern cathedrals never saw these forest forms; and that
the likeness of their work to those of tropic nature is at most only
a corroboration of Mr. Ruskin's dictum, that "the Gothic did not
arise out of, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation
. . . It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the
bending of a bough, but the gradual and continual discovery of a
beauty in natural forms which could be more and