may be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades.  The last cause may perhaps be the true one:  but it matters little whence the pointed arch came.  It matters much what it meant to those who introduced it.  And at the beginning of the Transition or semi-Norman period, it seems to have meant nothing.  It was not till the thirteenth century that it had gradually received, as it were, a soul, and had become the exponent of a great idea.  As the Norman architecture and its forms had signified domination, so the Early English, as we call it, signified aspiration; an idea which was perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decorated style.

There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between the architectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth century.  A vertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom, appears; and with them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature and art.  And here I ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings of this new era—­there is a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade {304}—­and judge for yourselves whether they, and even more than they the Decorated style into which they developed, do not remind you of the forest shapes?

And if they remind you:  must they not have reminded those who shaped them?  Can it have been otherwise?  We know that the men who built were earnest.  The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have given a subject for some of Mr. Ruskin’s noblest chapters, a text for some of his noblest sermons.  We know that they were students of vegetable form.  That is proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the birds, with which they enwreathed their capitals and enriched their mouldings.  Look up there, and see.

You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century, without seeing that leaves and flowers were perpetually in the workman’s mind.  Do you fancy that stems and boughs were never in his mind?  He kept, doubtless, in remembrance the fundamental idea, that the Christian church should symbolise a grot or cave.  He could do no less; while he again and again saw hermits around him dwelling and worshipping in caves, as they had done ages before in Egypt and Syria; while he fixed, again and again, the site of his convent and his minster in some secluded valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, like Vale Crucis in North Wales.  But his minster stood often not among rocks only, but amid trees; in some clearing in the primeval forest, as Vale Crucis was then.  At least he could not pass from minster to minster, from town to town, without journeying through long miles of forest.  Do you think that the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never haunted his imagination as he built?  He would have cut down ruthlessly, as his predecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which Thor and Odin had