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They seem to be the columns on which the vault is supported; and we have at last the avenue of stone. The nave of York Minster was built at an intermediate stage, in which neither the vertical nor the horizontal tendency predominated. We might have expected, therefore, a design something like that in the naves of Exeter or Worcester; but the York builders were ambitious.
Space will not permit any review here of the various theories in regard to the builders, or of the objections made to the theory that they were Indians, or of the historical evidence adducible in support of this theory. Simple declaration on these points must suffice.
There are three things here that I wish to say a word about the patchwork building, the testing fire, the fate of the builders. I. First, the patchwork structure.
The remains of all, or almost all, other styles of architecture enable us to trace their rude beginnings, their development, their gradual progress up to a culminating point, and thence their slow but certain decline; but the earliest remains of the constructions of the Egyptians show their skill as builders at the height of its perfection, their architecture highly developed, and their sculpture at its very best, if not indeed at the commencement of its decadence; for some of the statuary of the age of the Pyramids was never surpassed in artistic effect by the work of a later era.
But just as castles in the air do not commonly become the property of their builders, so mansions in the skies almost as frequently have failed of direct inheritance. Rather strikingly has this proved the case with what are to-day the two most powerful religions of the world, Buddhism and Christianity. Neither is now the belief of its founder's people.
But not even when the human builders began to erect the church on the miraculously chosen ground did supernatural interposition cease. A stranger workman came and laboured at the building: never was he seen to eat as the other workmen did, never did he come with his fellows to receive his wages.
All night we plowed ahead over the brilliant, starry, tropical sea, making splendid time, for the yacht was one of the fastest that had ever been turned out by the builders. Now and then I could see that Kennedy was furtively watching Norma, in the hope that she might betray whatever secret it was she was guarding so jealously.
She had grown accustomed to give northward, not to receive; and it was the reign of Saint Louis before she began to assimilate the architectural ideas of the Isle de France and to build in the Gothic style, it was admiration for the newer ideals which led the builders of the South to change such of their plans as were not already carried out, and to try with these foreign and beautiful additions, to give to their churches the most perfect form they could conceive.
Do you not think we should all be happier, girls, if we took more time to appreciate the commonplace? I have observed in the lives of great naturalists, that not only the stone which all other builders had rejected became the head of the corner in their temple of knowledge, but that the most patient observation of simplest things was the material out of which the edifice was made.
Mineral waters, fashion, a clever physician, the Warwickshire hounds, the surplus capital of Birmingham, speculative builders, and excellent sanitary regulations have contributed to the rapid rise of this picturesque and fashionable watering-place; in what proportions it would be difficult to say.
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