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Updated: May 15, 2025
Rugged spurs, and moraines, and huge, projecting buttresses began to shut me in. Every feature became more rigidly alpine, without, however, producing any chilling effect; for going to the mountains is like going home. We always find that the strangest objects in these fountain wilds are in some degree familiar, and we look upon them with a vague sense of having seen them before.
This aqueduct is seven or eight hundred paces in length, and extends as far as the spot where the Dog's-river rushes over rocks and stones, forming not a lofty, but yet a fine waterfall. Just below this fall a bridge of Roman architecture, supported boldly on rocky buttresses, unites the two shores.
§ VII. In order to give greater weight to the vertical buttress piers which sustain the conducting buttresses, they are loaded with pinnacles, which, however, are, I believe, in all the buildings in which they become very prominent, merely decorative: they are of some use, indeed, by their weight; but if this were all for which they were put there, a few cubic feet of lead would much more securely answer the purpose, without any danger from exposure to wind.
Every one has observed those sloping declivities, composed of the washings of torrents, the débris of precipices, and what may be termed the constant drippings of perpendicular eminencies and which lie like broad buttresses at their feet, forming a sort of foundation or basement for the superincumbent mass.
It is a pretty structure, pointed Gothic in style, consciously reproduced with all the aids of flying buttresses, niches, pinnacles, and arches. It was doubtless a splendid gift.
And it is difficult to express with sufficient force the absurdity of the supposition that there is more room for refinements of proportion in the relations of seven or eight equal pillars, with the triangular end of a roof above them, than between the shafts, and buttresses, and porches, and pinnacles, and vaultings, and towers, and all other doubly and trebly multiplied magnificences of membership which form the framework of a Gothic temple.
The building has since been converted into one of the canons' houses. While he was contemplating this beautiful gateway, which was glimmering in the bright moonlight, a tall figure suddenly darted from behind one of the buttresses of the chapel, and seized his left arm with an iron grasp.
On the eastern face there is a simple pointed window, and there is nothing else to relieve the perfectly plain walls below except two string courses, and the elaborate side buttresses with their tall pinnacles and twisted shafts. But if the walling is plain the cornice is most elaborate.
A number of narrow slits or air-holes are carried through the building from side to side; they penetrate alike the walls and buttresses, and must have tended to preserve the dryness of the structure. The second story is, like the first, a parallelogram, and not of very different proportions. Its longer sides measure 119 feet, and its shorter ones 75 feet at the base.
The coupled windows are more deeply recessed, having three orders of moulded arch-stones instead of the two, as in the lower window of a similar date; and the arch is carried by three shafts attached as parts of the jamb-stones. The windows have label-moulds over them, and the abaci of the capitals are carried across the buttresses on either side as a string-course.
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