222 Shadowings 



of a growing life, , but in the suggestion of an 

 energy supernatural and tremendous. 



Of course the child, oppressed by the strange 

 ness of Gothic forms, is yet incapable of analyzing 

 the impression received : he is frightened without 

 comprehending. He cannot divine that the points 

 and the curves are terrible to him because they rep 

 resent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of 

 vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because 

 they seem alive ; yet he does not know how to 

 express this dread. Without suspecting why, he 

 feels that this silent manifestation of power, 

 everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not 

 natural. To his startled imagination, the build 

 ing stretches itself like a phantasm of sleep, 

 makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. 

 Even though built by hands of men, it has ceased 

 to be a mass of dead stone: it is infused with 

 Something that thinks and threatens; it has 

 become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple 

 goblinry, a monstrous fetish ! 



