is pretty much in the same tune as Shelley; he builds ideal dream-castles, as in "Hyperion":

"His palace bright,

Bastioned with pyramids of glowing gold,

And touched with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries."

There is a fine touch, half historic, in regard. to the musings of the nymph Asia :

"More thought than woe was in her dusky face,
For she was prophesying of her glory,

And in her wide imagination stood
Palm-shaded temples and high rival fanes
By Oxus or on Ganges' sacred isles."

But of all suggestions of visionary architecture in poetry there is perhaps nothing so ethereal as that in "Lamia," of the witch's mansion supported on sound alone :

"A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
Supportress of the fairy roof."

One is reminded of Tennyson's

But here the music is only the cause which sets in motion the magic power that causes the walls of Troy to rise; once risen, they stand independently; in "Lamia" the music is actually the scaffolding of the structureit will collapse when the sound ceases; one of the most strange and weird fancies in English poetry. One vividly picturesque passage in regard to the actual detail of Gothic architecture ends the list of Keats's architectural references:

"The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,

Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,

With hair blown back, and wings put crosswise on their breasts."

Wordsworth, the opposite of Keats in so many respects, builds no ideal palaces, but he draws, in one of the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," a fine spiritual symbolism from the material

A.P.

G

forms of the mediæval building, in which he

sees

"Diffused in every part

Spirit divine through forms of human art ;

Faith had her arch-her arch when winds blew loud,

Into the consciousness of safety thrilled;

And Love her towers of dread foundation, laid
Under the grave of things; Hope had her spire
Star-high, and pointing still to something higher."

The last line and a-half has been often quoted, and illustrates possibly the feeling of those who designed the church spires, certainly that which they have suggested to many a beholder; and the whole passage is a fine example of what may be called intellectual symbolism, based upon the association of ideas, as opposed to the merely material or ecclesiological symbolism, which arbitrarily selects a certain detail to signify a certain idea with which it has no natural or intellectual association.* Speaking of church

* Ex. gr., the vesica piscis as the symbol of Christ, or the oblique setting out of the chancel on plan to represent the inclination of Christ's head on the cross. It is not certain that this is the motive for the obliquity of the chancel walls in a good many medieval churches, but it is the most probable

towers, one may remember that Mrs. Browning derived a different and more mundane suggestion from the Campanile at Florence ("Casa Guidi Windows"):

the "

question being asked on behalf of Florence-What high place might not the city take whose artist had done this?

Wordsworth's most highly elaborated and deliberate architectural passage is to be found in the well-known three sonnets on King's Chapel, which it is almost superfluous to quote; the salient expressions in them have become household words. His epithet "self-poised," in regard to the vault, recalls Congreve's expression before noticed, "By its own weight made steadfast"; both poets, without exactly

reason; and, if the true one, is a curious example of the childishness, in some respects, of the mediæval mind. In the words of Bacon, "These be but toys."

* Whether, in fact, Giotto had anything to do with the campanile is now at least a vexata quæstio, if it has not indeed passed beyond that stage.

understanding the construction, recognised that the medieval vault was a matter of balance of thrusts. Less familiar, and pitched in a lower key, is Wordsworth's nevertheless very interesting and sympathetic picture (in "The Excursion") of the interior of the country parish church, as it was to be found in his day, in what may be called the preRestoration period, with its curious assemblage of well-meant but incongruous monuments and furniture:

“As chanced, the portals of the sacred pile
Stood open, and we entered. On my frame,
At such transition from the fervid air,
A grateful coolness fell, that served to strike
The heart, in concert with the temperate awe
And natural reverence that the place inspired.
Not raised in nice proportions was the pile,
But large and massy, for duration built;
With pillars crowded, and the roof upheld
By naked rafters intricately cross'd

Like leafless underboughs, 'mid some thick grove,
All wither'd by the depth of shade above.
Admonitory texts inscribed the walls,
Each in its ornamental scroll inclosed,

Each also crown'd with winged heads—a pair
Of rudely painted cherubim. The floor

Of nave and aisle, in unpretending guise,