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in Arlington street and the other in Berkeley. The one 

 is composite, the other gothic. The Arlington street is 

 a very poor production in its own style, has no just pro- 

 portion nor elegance and is a clumsy copy of St. Martin's 

 In The Fields, in Trafalgar Square, London. The 

 steeple spire can never have much inspiration in it though 

 it may have elegance. Spires are gothic. They are the 

 fine fruit of its aspiration. Gothic is a thirst, a climbing, 

 an aspiration. Great interiors, with ribbed and bended 

 roofs, are like hands folded in prayer, and stretched to 

 heaven. Every moulding is an emotion, pinnacles are 

 ecstasy, niches are psalms, shafts are anthems, stained glass 

 the heaven itself, sunset or the dawn. Gothic is like soul 

 in style, classic mind ; the one poetry, the other prose ; 

 gothic feeling, classic thought. One is of heaven, the 

 other earth. However broken, the snatches of it enchant, 

 like strains of music. As a natural vegetation, it entwines, 

 shoots, and embraces. It is mysterious, exuberant, un- 

 ending. It is like a monument to nature built by man. 

 In no other style has the spire a raison d* etre. Others 

 are piled up, imposing, but not inspired. Grace, majesty, 

 proportion, design, do not supply this motive of soaring, 

 vaulting growth, and piercing exultation. Thej r are cold. 

 Gothic is as multitudinous as nature. She might have done 

 it herself. It is like three centuries of Shakespeare. In 

 its greatness, all men's lives were in it', and all their lives. 

 Other styles eke out their outlines with clumsy expedients, 

 urns, and vases, and knobs. Gothic produces every part 

 out of every other part, naturally, as nature works. It is 

 evolved, integral, fused. In other styles ornaments are 

 lodged, attached, in this they grow. One is constructed, 

 the other lives. Composite styles miss the inevitable, as 

 Wordsworth says, Goethe's lines do. They have de- 

 scended from ancient times, and nothing akin anciently 



