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.  But religions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a noble self-discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward and aspiring form of building.  It is not merely that, fancying heaven to be above earth, they point towards heaven.  There is a deeper natural language in the pyramidal form of a growing tree.  It symbolises growth, or the desire of growth.  The Norman tower does nothing of the kind.  It does not aspire to grow.  Look—­I mention an instance with which I am most familiar—­at the Norman tower of Bury St. Edmund’s.  It is graceful—­awful, if you will—­but there is no aspiration in it.  It is stately:  but self-content.  Its horizontal courses; circular arches; above all, its flat sky-line, seem to have risen enough:  and wish to rise no higher.  For it has no touch of that unrest of soul, which is expressed by the spire, and still more by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials, which are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really terminal buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as the crockets are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.

You feel, surely, the truth of these last words.  You cannot look at the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds and leaves are there carven before your eyes.  I myself cannot look at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the young pine forests which clothe the Hampshire moors.  But if the details are copied from vegetable forms, why not the whole?  Is not a spire like a growing tree, a tabernacle like a fir-tree, a compound spire like a group of firs?  And if we can see that:  do you fancy that the man who planned the spire did not see it as clearly as we do; and perhaps more clearly still?

I am aware, of course, that Norman architecture had sometimes its pinnacle, a mere conical or polygonal capping.  I am aware that this form, only more and more slender, lasted on in England during the thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth century; and on the Continent, under many modifications, one English kind whereof is usually called a “broach,” of which you have a beautiful specimen in the new church at Hoole.

Now, no one will deny that that broach is beautiful.  But it would be difficult to prove that its form was taken from a North European tree.  The cypress was unknown, probably, to our northern architects.  The Lombardy poplar—­which has wandered hither, I know not when, all the way from Cashmere—­had not wandered then, I believe, further than North Italy.  The form is rather that of mere stone; of the obelisk, or of the mountain peak; and they, in fact, may have at first suggested the spire.  The grandeur of an isolated mountain, even of a dolmen or single upright stone, is evident to all.