THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 22, 26 January 1935, Page 13 (Supplement)

THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL.

The Gothic church (says Emerson) | plainly originated in a rude adaptation i of the' forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods, on a winter afternoon, one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colours of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest; nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane, still reproduced its forms, its spikes of flowers, its locust, its pine, its oak, its fir, its spruce.