Essays, First Series | Page 8

and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I
have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed
to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the

thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides
of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common
architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent
anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each
people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple
preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt.
The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian
temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their
forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in the living
rock," says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determined
very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian
architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns,
already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge
shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assistance of nature it
could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. What would
statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings have been,
associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit
as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation 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 barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons.
In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of
the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned,
in the colors 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 ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak,
pine, fir and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable

demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an
eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial
proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts
are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and
Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender
shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus
and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave over
the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana,
where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon for the
winter.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are
the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa
necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those
whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build
towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the
perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries
of England and America these propensities still fight out the old battle,
in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were
constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the
cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and
to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia
follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the
nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the
gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay.
Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined,
or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond,
were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long
residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The
antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the
love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man
of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication,
lives