the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the
lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets
side by side the burning gems, and smoothes with soft sculpture the
jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into
a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when,
with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation
out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland,
and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged
wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the
northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of
wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds
that shade them.

There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity
and honorableness; and we should err grievously in refusing either to
recognise as an essential character of the existing architecture of the
North, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it yet may be,
this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain
brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp; this magnificence of
sturdy power, put forth only the more energetically because the fine
finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye dimmed by
the moor-mist, or blinded by the hail; this outspeaking of the strong
spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the earth, nor
bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for bread,
and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for
their delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew on
them as they swung the axe or pressed the plough.

Sec. IX. If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an
expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in
some sort, a noble character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when
considered as an index, not of climate, but of religious principle.

In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXI. of the first volume of
this work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament,
properly so called, might be divided into three:--1. Servile ornament,
in which the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely
subjected to the intellect of the higher:--2. Constitutional ornament,
in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain point,