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Updated: May 1, 2025
As we retrace our steps we follow the line of the transepts. When we reach the exposed foundations, let us pause awhile and allow our imagination full sway. We are standing in the midst of the choir, in the "dim religious light" of a great mediæval church. Above is the "high embowed roof" of the central tower; around are the stalls set in a screen of woodwork intricately carved.
I dare say it did most of the people present a little good, undefinable as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that "high embowed roof," within that vast artistic isolation, through whose mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped.
His legs were slightly embowed, and he bore himself like a man rarely out of the saddle. Downham, the residence of the squire, was a fine old house, very charmingly situated to the north of Pendle Hill, of which it commanded a magnificent view, and a few miles from Clithero.
At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat.
Nor does any shadow of the coming struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as he wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with antique pillars massy proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light," or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below, in service high and anthem clear."
The poem moves with more stately measure, "with even step, and musing gait," from evening through the moonlit night till morn. It ends with the poet's desire to live a peaceful studious life. "But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale; And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light.
We came at length to a forest whose trees were greater, grander, and more beautiful than any we had yet seen. Their live pillars upheaved a thick embowed roof, betwixt whose leaves and blossoms hardly a sunbeam filtered.
Sir Christopher Wren said of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, that they were 'vast and gigantic buildings indeed, but not worthy the name of architecture. Even at such times there were some who were proof against the caprice of fashionable taste, and who were not insensible to the solemn grandeur of 'high embowed roofs, 'massy pillars, and 'storied windows. Lord Lyttelton censured the old architecture as 'loaded with a multiplicity of idle and useless parts, yet granted that 'upon the whole it has a mighty awful air, and strikes you with reverence. Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster was still regarded with admiration as 'that wonder of the world; and although people did not quite know what to do with their cathedrals, and regarded them rather as curiosities, alien to the times, and heirlooms from a dead past, they did not cease to speak of them with some pride.
I dare say it did most of the people present a little good, undefinable as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that "high embowed roof," within that vast artistic isolation, through whose mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped.
There seem to have been three chambers, one above another, in these towers, and the one in which was the embowed window was the middle one. I suppose the diameter of each of these circular rooms could not have been more than twenty feet on the inside. All traces of wood-work and iron-work are quite gone from the whole castle.
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