in the likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head.  He raised those walls into great cliffs.  He pierced them with the arches of the triforium, as with hermits’ cells.  He represented in the horizontal sills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, the horizontal strata of the rocks.  He opened the windows into high and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems and boughs, through which was seen, not merely the outer, but the upper world.  For he craved, as all true artists crave, for light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, he might have been content with it, and left his glass transparent.  But in that dark, dank, northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and gray mist, were all that he was like to see outside for nine months in the year.  So he took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his stained-glass windows, the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and the sunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy; and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven, and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that he might lift up his own eyes and heart for ever out of the dark, dank, sad world of the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a realm of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light; as one who—­for he was true to nature, even in that—­from between the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of gnarled trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and cottages, and purple mountain ranges, and the far-off sea, and the hazy horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into an infinite at once of freedom and of repose.

And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of his church.  And how did he shape the outside?  Look for yourselves, and judge.  But look, not at Chester, but at Salisbury.  Look at those churches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least pinnacled towers approaching the pyramidal form.  The outside form of every Gothic cathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not culminate in something pyramidal.

The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are acquainted is the absence—­save in a few and unimportant cases—­of the pyramidal form.  The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk; but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that:  their buildings are flat-topped.  Their builders were contented with the earth as it was.  There was a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny.