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And the flight of the nave was stronger marked than ever, with the heavy curved pillars below, supporting the round arches, while above, the numbers of little columns grew smaller and smaller as they burst forth among the broken arches of the ogives, like an inexpressible declaration of faith and love which seemed to come from the lights.
Close to the spectre, in one of the ogives of the door, on each side of a great seat, which stood on a large flat stone, stood two men swathed in long black cloaks; and on the seat an old man was sitting, dressed in a red robe wan, motionless, and ominous, holding a bunch of roses in his hand. The bunch of roses would have enlightened any one less ignorant that Gwynplaine.
It appears to be a feeble reflection of the Lombard-Arab forms, which were attaining perfection upon the continent, and would probably, if left to itself, have been soon merged in the Venetian-Arab school, with which it had from the first so close a fellowship, that it will be found difficult to distinguish the Arabian ogives from those which seem to have been built under this early Gothic influence.
The last Gothic of this Bishop's borough which the King seized from the Church clings to chance houses in little carven masks and occasional ogives: there is everywhere a feast for whatever in the mind is curious, searching, and reverent, and over the town, as over all the failing ports of our silting eastern seaboard, hangs the air of a great past time, the influence of the Baltic and the Lowlands.
And between these two ran a festoon of electric lanterns, Japanese and Moorish, cut in ogives; and festoons of coloured moons drooped round the balustrades, so that the blaze and complexity of it presented to ships a spectacle of speckled mystery, fresh to the sea.
I approached, quite surprised, the window of my cell, and I could not exactly tell you the nature of the emotion I felt on discovering the ruins of the church illuminated with a resplendent blaze; the vast portal and the yawning ogives cast floods of light far as the distant woods. It was not, it could not be, an accidental conflagration.
If you examine the plans and old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; of this assemblage of all forms, pointed, swelling, angular, oblong, circular and octagonal.
Around me hustled fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style: campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas, crenelations, volutes, arcades, façades, colossal foundations, sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our cathedrals all were massed together and confused in a common disaster.
Imagine, in front of the Marienkirche, whose spires and roof of oxydized copper rise above it, a lofty brick façade, blackened by time, bristling with three bell-towers with pointed copper-covered roofs, having two great empty rose-windows, and emblazoned with escutcheons inscribed in the trefoils of its ogives, double-headed black eagles on a gold field, and shields, half gules, half argent, ranged alternately, and executed in the most elaborate fashion of heraldry.
Here his stupefaction attained a climax at sight of the clustering columns cased in stucco imitating marble, the ogives which dared not soar, the rounded vaults condemned to the heavy majesty of the dome style. No, no, thought he, the faith whose cooling cinders lingered there was no longer that whose brazier had invaded and set all Christendom aglow!
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