contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill
ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness;
and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth
against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this
gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go
down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the
multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or
tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards,
glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast
their delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-
cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern
tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard
with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with
the osprey: and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the
earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn,
but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands
that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side
the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are
to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less
reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke,
4. Hot wind from the southern Mediterranean. 5. Ornamental, or embossed. 'Chased': decorated.
.
132 6 / JOHN RUSKIN
he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from
among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of
iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with6 work of an imagination as wild
and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb,
but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the
clouds that shade them. There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity and
honorableness: and we should err grievously in refusing either to recognize as
an essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as
a desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wildness of thought, and
roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral
and the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more ener
getically because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind,
and the eye dimmed by the moor mist, or blinded by the hail; this outspeaking
of the strong spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the
earth, nor bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for
bread, and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their
delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew on them as
they swung the ax or pressed the plow. If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression
of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble
character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not
of climate, but of religious principle.
In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXI of the first volume of this
work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament, properly so
called, might be divided into three: (1) Servile ornament, in which the exe
cution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect
of the higher; (2) Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior
