been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which still darker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of Eastern Europe.  But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped in those groves; and the glamour of them was upon him still.  He peopled the wild forest with demons and fairies:  but that did not surely prevent his feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening loneliness.  His ancestors had held the oaks for trees of God, even as the Jews held the Cedar, and the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara pine is not only, botanists tell us, the same as the Cedar of Lebanon:  but its very name—­the Deodara—­signifies nought else but “The tree of God.”

His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God.  It may be that as the monk sat beneath their shade with his Bible on his knee, like good St. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his ancestors were right.

To understand what sort of trees they were from which he got his inspiration:  you must look, not at an average English wood, perpetually thinned out as the trees arrive at middle age.  Still less must you look at the pines, oaks, beeches, of an English park, where each tree has had space to develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form.  You must not even look at the tropic forests.  For there, from the immense diversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath each other, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the ground to a hundred feet and more aloft.

You should look at the North American forests of social trees—­especially of pines and firs, where trees of one species, crowded together, and competing with equal advantages for the air and light, form themselves into one wilderness of straight smooth shafts, surmounted by a flat sheet of foliage, held up by boughs like the ribs of a groined roof; while underneath the ground is bare as a cathedral floor.

You all know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern.

Yet if you look at the same tree, when it has struggled long for life from its youth amid other trees of its own kind and its own age; you find that the lower boughs have died off from want of light, leaving not a scar behind.  The upper boughs have reached at once the light, and their natural term of years.  They are content to live, and little more.  The central trunk no longer sends up each year a fresh perpendicular shoot to aspire above the rest:  but as weary of struggling ambition as they are, is content to become more and more their equal as the years pass by.  And this is a law of social forest trees, which you must bear in mind, whenever I speak of the influence of tree-forms on Gothic architecture.