But it is the grandeur not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the Christian, not even of the Stoic, but rather of the Epicurean.  It says—­I cannot rise.  I do not care to rise.  I will be contentedly and valiantly that which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them.  But it is defiance under defeat.  The mountain-peak does not grow, but only decays.  Fretted by rains, peeled by frost, splintered by lightning, it must down at last; and crumble into earth, were it as old, as hard, as lofty as the Matterhorn itself.  And while it stands, it wants not only aspiration, it wants tenderness; it wants humility; it wants the unrest which tenderness and humility must breed, and which Mr. Ruskin so clearly recognises in the best Gothic art.  And, meanwhile, it wants naturalness.  The mere smooth spire or broach—­I had almost said, even the spire of Salisbury—­is like no tall or commanding object in nature.  It is merely the caricature of one—­it may be of the mountain-peak.  The outline must be broken, must be softened, before it can express the soul of a creed which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, far more than now, was one of penitence as well as of aspiration, of passionate emotion as well as of lofty faith.  But a shape which will express that soul must be sought, not among mineral, but among vegetable, forms.  And remember always, if we feel thus even now, how much more must those medieval men of genius have felt thus, whose work we now dare only copy line by line?

So—­as it seems to me—­they sought among vegetable forms for what they needed:  and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the fir—­the spruce and silver firs of their own forests.  They are not, of course, indigenous to England.  But they are so common through all the rest of Europe, that not only would the form suggest itself to a continental architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all did who could, across the Alps to Rome.  The fir-tree, not growing on level ground, like the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of foliage, but clinging to the hillside and the crag, old above young, spire above spire, whorl above whorl—­for the young shoots of each whorl of boughs point upward in the spring; and now and then a whole bough breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward altogether, and forms a secondary spire on the same tree—­this surely was the form which the medieval architect seized, to clothe with it the sides and roof of the stone mountain which he had built; piling up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the angles; that, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea culminated in that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be completed, will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs, surrounded by three enormous pines.