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, farther 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. 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?