st certain that it was in the forest
that man found the prototype of the nave and the pointed arch. The most
amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of
the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges. There, close to the
splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact,
while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of
foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary
boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two
others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a
church nave with its two side aisles, upheld by black columns and roofed
with verdure. The ribs of the arches are accurately represented by the
branches which meet above, as the columns which support them are
simulated by the great shafts. It must be seen in winter, with the
groining outlined and powdered with snow, and the pillars as white as
the trunks of birch-trees, to understand the primitive idea, the seed of
art which could give rise in the mind of an architect to the conception
of similar arcades, and lead to the gradual refining of the Romanesque
till the pointed arch had entirely superseded the round.

"And there is not a park, whether older or more recent than the groves
of Jumieges, which does not exhibit the same forms with equal
exactitude; but what Nature could not give was the prodigious art, the
deep symbolical knowledge, the over-strung but tranquil mysticism of the
believers who erected cathedrals. But for them the church in its
rough-hewn state, as Nature had formed it, was but a soulless thing, a
sketch, rudimentary; the embryo only of a basilica, varying with the
seasons and the days, at once living and inert, awaking only to the
roaring organ of the wind, the swaying roof of boughs wrung with the
slightest breath; it was lax and often sullen; the yielding victim of
the breeze, the resigned slave of the rain; it was lighted only by the
sunshine that filtered between the diamond and heart-shaped leaves, as
if through the meshes of a green network. Man's genius collected the
scattered gleams, condensed them in roses and broad blades, to pour it
into his avenues of white shafts; and even in the darkest weather the
glass was splendid, catching the very last rays of sunset, dressing
Christ and the Virgin in the most fabulous magnificence, and almost
realizing on earth the only attire that beseems the glorified Body, a
robe