States of solidity and liquidity connected with strength, or with repose; and of the duty of staying quiet in a place, or under a law, and the mischief of leaving it, being all fastened in the minds of early builders, and of the generations of men for whom they built, by the unescapable bearing of geological laws on their life; by the ease or difficulty of splitting rocks, by the variable consistency of the fragments split, by the innumerable questions occurring practically as to bedding and cleavage in every kind of stone, from tufo to granite, and by the unseemly or beautiful, destructive or protective, effects of decomposition.[1] The same processes of time which cause your Oxford oolite to flake away like the leaves of a mouldering book only warm with a glow of perpetually deepening gold the marbles of Athens and Verona; and the same laws of chemical change which reduce the
- ↑ This passage cannot but seem to the reader loose and fantastic. I have elaborate notes, and many an unwritten thought, on these matters, but no time or strength to develop them. The passage is not fantastic, but the rapid index of what I know to be true in all the named particulars. But compare, for mere rough illustration of what I mean, the moral ideas relating to the stone of Jacob's pillow, or the tradition of it, with those to which French Flamboyant Gothic owes its character.
