the
employment of a rougher material, compelling the workman to seek for
vigor of effect, rather than refinement of texture or accuracy of form,
we have direct and manifest causes for much of the difference between
the northern and southern cast of conception: but there are indirect
causes holding a far more important place in the Gothic heart, though
less immediate in their influence on design. Strength of will,
independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue
control, and that general tendency to set the individual reason against
authority, and the individual deed against destiny, which, in the
Northern tribes, has opposed itself throughout all ages to the languid
submission, in the Southern, of thought to tradition, and purpose to
fatality, are all more or less traceable in the rigid lines, vigorous
and various masses, and daringly projecting and independent structure of
the Northern Gothic ornament: while the opposite feelings are in like
manner legible in the graceful and softly guided waves and wreathed
bands, in which Southern decoration is constantly disposed; in its
tendency to lose its independence, and fuse itself into the surface of
the masses upon which it is traced; and in the expression seen so often,
in the arrangement of those masses themselves, of an abandonment of
their strength to an inevitable necessity, or a listless repose.

Sec. LXXVII. There is virtue in the measure, and error in the excess, of
both these characters of mind, and in both of the styles which they have
created; the best architecture, and the best temper, are those which
unite them both; and this fifth impulse of the Gothic heart is therefore
that which needs most caution in its indulgence. It is more definitely
Gothic than any other, but the best Gothic building is not that which is
_most_ Gothic: it can hardly be too frank in its confession of rudeness,
hardly too rich in its changefulness, hardly too faithful in its
naturalism; but it may go too far in its rigidity, and, like the great
Puritan spirit in its extreme, lose itself either in frivolity of
division, or perversity of purpose.[67] It actually did so in its later
times; but it is gladdening to remember that in its utmost nobleness,
the very temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the
Protestant spirit of self-dependence and inquiry, was expressed in its
every line. Faith and aspiration there were, in every Christian
ecclesiastical buildin