objects to make it possible that
those objects may have suggested them. And thus, more and more
boldly, the medieval architect learnt to copy boughs, stems, and at
last, the whole effect, as far always as stone would allow, of a
combination of rock and tree, of grot and grove.

So he formed his minsters, as I believe, upon the model of those
leafy minsters in which he walked to meditate, amid the aisles which
God, not man, has built. He sent their columns aloft like the boles
of ancient trees. He wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very
shafts, with flowers and creeping shoots. He threw their arches out,
and interwove the groinings of their vaults, like the bough-roofage
overhead. He decked with foliage and fruit the bosses above and the
corbels below. He sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along
the walls, in the likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks
above his head. He raised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced
them with the arches of the triforium, as with hermits' cells. He
represented in the horizontal sills of his windows, and in his
horizontal string-courses, the horizontal strata of the rocks. He
opened the windows into high and lofty glades, broken, as in the
forest, by the tracery of stems and boughs, through which was seen,
not merely the outer, but the upper world. For he craved, as all
true artists crave, for light and colour; and had the sky above been
one perpetual blue, he might have been content with it, and left his
glass transparent. But in that dark, dank, northern clime, rain and
snowstorm, black cloud and gray mist, were all that he was like to
see outside for nine months in the year. So he took such light and
colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his
stained-glass windows, the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and
the sunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the
gold of the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of
the poppy; and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the
saints of heaven, and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic
sufferings, that he might lift up his own eyes and heart for ever out
of the dark, dank, sad world of the cold north, with all its
coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a realm of perpetual holiness,
amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light; as one who--for he
was true to nature, even in that--from between the black jaws of a
narrow glen, or from beneath