all an heroic age--heroic in its virtues
and in its crimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of
early manhood; full of aspirations of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as
strange and terrible as it was beautiful and noble, even when most
misguided. The Teutonic nations of Europe--our own forefathers most
of all--having absorbed all that heathen Rome could teach them, at
least for the time being, began to think for themselves; to have
poets, philosophers, historians, architects, of their own. The
thirteenth century was especially an age of aspiration; and its
architects expressed, in building, quite unlike those of the
preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time.

The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before. It may
be that the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home. It may
be that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans,
the segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to
appearance the pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that
mystical figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may
be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of
semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The
last cause may perhaps be the true one; but it matters little whence
the pointed arch came. It matters much what it meant to those who
introduced it. And at the beginning of the Transition or semi-Norman
period, it seems to have meant nothing. It was not till the
thirteenth century that it had gradually received, as it were, a
soul, and had become the exponent of a great idea. As the Norman
architecture and its forms had signified domination, so the Early
English, as we call it, signified aspiration--an idea which was
perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decorated
style.

There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between the
architectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth
century. A vertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom
appears; and with them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature
and art. And here I ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings
of this new era--there is a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade
{278}--and judge for yourselves whether they, and even more than they
the Decorated style into which they developed, do not remind you of
the forest shapes?

And if they remind you, must they not have reminded those who shaped
them? Can i