na uttered no oracles.

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

To him Nature was an open book, from which he continually quoted with a
loving freedom, not to illustrate his own deep relationships with her,
but to give greater glory to that vast Power which stood behind her
beautiful text and was revealed to him in the new religion from
Palestine. He loved fruits and flowers and leaves because they were
manifestations of the Love of God; and he used them in his Art, not as
motives out of which to create abstract forms, out of which to eliminate
an ideal humanity, but to show his intense appreciation of the Divine
Love which gave them. Had he been a Pantheist, as Orpheus was, it is
probable he would have idealized these things and created Greek lines.
But believing in a distinct God, the supreme Originator of all things,
he was led to a worship of sacrifice and offerings, and needed no Ideal.
So, with a lavish hand, he appropriated the abundant Beauty of Nature,
imitating its external expressions with his careful chisel, and
suffering his sculptured lines to throw their wayward tendrils and
vagrant leaflets outside the strict limits of his spandrels. The life of
Gothic lines was in their sensuous liberty; the life of Greek lines
was in their intellectual reserve. Those arose out of a religion of
emotional ardor; these, out of a religion of philosophical reflection.
Hence, while the former were wild and picturesque, the latter were
serious, chaste, and very human.

Doubtless the nearest approach to ideal abstractions to be found in
Mediaeval Art is contained in that remarkable and very characteristic
system of foliations and cuspidations in tracery, which were suggested
by the leaf-forms in Nature. In this adaptation, when first it was
initiated in the earliest phases of Gothic, there is something like
Greek Love. The simple trefoil aperture seems a fair architectural
version of the clover-leaves. But the propriety of the use of these
clover-lines was hinted by a constructive exigency, the pointed arch.
The inevitable assimilation of the natural forms of leaves with this
feature was too evident not to be improved by such active and ardent
worshippers as the Freemasons. Thus originated Gothic tracery, which
afterwards branched out into such sumptuous and unrestrained luxury as
we find in the Decorated styles of England, the Flamboyant of France,
the late Geometric