When the reader who may be interested in the architecture of the middle ages meets in its tracery, as he often must, the Ivy-leaf, let him recall that here is a symbol which was not used unthinkingly by the Free Masons, who seldom lost an opportunity to bring forward their orientally derived Nature-lore. In fact, the whole mass and body of mediaeval architectural emblems presents nothing less than a protest of Nature and life, independence and intelligence, knowledge and joyousness, against the gloomy prison of form and tyranny which held Truth in chains. The stone Ivy-leaf carved on the capitals of old cathedrals was as reviving a symbol to the heart of the Initiated as was the living Ivy on the walls without, green and beautiful among mid-winter's snow. It has been well conjectured by a German writer (STIEGLITZ, _Archaeologie der Baukunst der Griechen und Roemer_, Weimar, 1801, I _Theil_, Sec. 268), that the relation of the Ivy to Bacchus was probably the cause why it was so frequently introduced by the Greeks among the architectural ornaments of their temples; a very natural conjecture, when we remember that it was a firm conviction in the early faith, even of India, that where the Ivy was found, the god had literally been. The same bold spirit of tradition which brought into the very bosom of the church so much genial, latent heresy and heathen daring, kept the Ivy alive--for Nature and Truth _will_ live, and man will have his guardian angels, who will hope for him and for the dawn, though buried in the deepest night and lost among horrible dreams and ghastly incubi. A French writer on mediaeval art[5] has declared that an excellent work might be written on the foliage of Christian architecture, but regrets that the relations of the leaves as employed--or, in fact, the law guiding their employment--should be unintelligible. Let them be studied according to their symbolical and antique meaning, and they will seem clear as legible letters; and to those who can read them, the gloomy Gothic piles will ray forth a strange and beautiful light--the sympathetic light of congenial minds long passed away, yet who did not vanish ere they had breathed out to those who were to come after them, in leaf or other character, their hatred of _the tyrant_, and their unfailing conviction of the Great Truth. GOD bless them all! I have studied for hours their solemn symbols--each a cry for freedom and a prayer for light; and when I thought of the gloom and cruelty and devilishness of the foul age which pressed around them, I wondered that they, knowing what they did, could have lived--ay, lived and sung and given a soul to art. And, understanding them in spirit and in truth, every Ivy-leaf carved by them seemed the whole Prometheus bound and unbound--yes, all poems of truth, all myths, all religion.