59 

 brouofht the feelinsrs which oriorinated them with them. 



c o o 



They root themselves in the ground from which they 

 grow. The mass is a simple unity. Nothing has been 

 done here so severely full of character. They are the 

 earliest and best things in design the country possesses. 

 Doric in simplicity, Gothic in skyey feeling, the vast 

 slope of the roof makes a splendid line of continuity. 

 Nothing in Europe is finer than their simple expressive- 

 ness and detached character. They grow from the soil. 

 This was gothic feeling, to begin from the ground. It 

 plants itself like a tree or a monntain, and clasps the soil 

 in which it roots itself. Classic is lodged, superimposed, 

 and has no principle of growth, nor is it so near to the 

 earth and representative of it. They are large, at least 

 in effect — Doric did not depend for its grandeur on size — 

 majestic. They hold us by a spell of the imagination like 

 early records. The imagination wants a background in 

 which she can paint something. She is worried in the 

 present. They are generally isolated, or were originally. 

 They were generous of land in those days. They rule the 

 domain, are emphatically mansions of a primitive type, 

 boulders from a mightier past. Like the grim towers 

 and castles of the middle age which lie like a vast skeleton 

 over Europe, they reflect another age. The baths, the 

 bridges, the huge amphitheatres scattered over southern 

 Europe and along the Mediterranean are the mastodon of 

 Rome — an extinct species. The pyramids, like mountain 

 tom])s in a desert land, are the bones of Egypt. The age 

 they represent is gone completely as the feudal time. 

 How finely were they in character with that great man 

 the puritan. 



It is mass makes architecture, and proportion, the ar- 

 rangements of it, and the cunningness of line and parts. 

 This great lean-to is like a hood to the house, as if it 



