t have been otherwise? We know that the men who built
were earnest. The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have
given a subject for some of Mr. Ruskin's noblest chapters, a text for
some of his noblest sermons. We know that they were students of
vegetable form. That is proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the
birds, with which they enwreathed their capitals and enriched their
mouldings. Look up there, and see.

You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the
middle of the fifteenth century, with out seeing that leaves and
flowers were perpetually in the workman's mind. Do you fancy that
stems and boughs were never in his mind? He kept, doubtless, in
remembrance the fundamental idea, that the Christian church should
symbolise a grot or cave. He could do no less; while he again and
again saw hermits around him dwelling and worshipping in caves, as
they had done ages before in Egypt and Syria; while he fixed, again
and again, the site of his convent and his minster in some secluded
valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, like Vale Crucis in North Wales.
But his minster stood often not among rocks only, but amid trees; in
some clearing in the primeval forest, as Vale Crucis was then. At
least he could not pass from minster to minster, from town to town,
without journeying through long miles of forest. Do you think that
the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never haunted his
imagination as he built? He would have cut down ruthlessly, as his
predecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which
Thor and Odin had been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which
still darker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of
Eastern Europe. But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped
in those groves, and the glamour of them was upon him still. He
peopled the wild forest with demons and fairies; but that did not
surely prevent his feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening
loneliness. His ancestors had held the oaks for trees of God, even
as the Jews held the cedar, and the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara
pine is not only, botanists tell us, the same as the cedar of
Lebanon, but its very name--the Deodara--signifies naught else but
"the tree of God."

His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God. It may be
that as the monk sat beneath their shade with his bible on his knee,
like good St. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his