Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/94

62 to the distant view of after times, as to the distant glance of the traveller is the culminating ridge of the mountain chain over which he has passed. It was the great watershed of Gothic art. Before it, all had been ascent; after it, all was decline; both, indeed, by winding paths and varied slopes; both interrupted, like the gradual rise and fall of the passes of the Alps, by great mountain outliers, isolated or branching from the central chain, and by retrograde or parallel directions of the valleys of access. But the track of the human mind is traceable up to that glorious ridge, in a continuous line, and thence downwards. Like a silver ezone:

Flung about carelessly, it shines afar,

Catching the eye in many a broken link,

In many a turn and traverse, as it glides.

And oft above, and oft below appears—
 * * * to him who journeys up.

As though it were another.

And at that point, and that instant, reaching the place that was nearest heaven, the builders looked back, for the last time, to the way by which they had come, and the scenes through which their early course had passed. They turned away from them and their morning light, audand [sic] descended towards a new horizon, for a time in the warmth of western sun, but plunging with every forward step into more cold and melancholy shade.

XXIII. The change of which I speak, is expressible in few words; but one more important, more radically influential, could not be. It was the substitution of the line for the mass, as the element of decoration.

We have seen the mode in which the openings or penetration of the window expanded, until what were, at first, awkward forms of intermediate stone, became delicate lines of tracery; and I have been careful in pointing out the peculiar attention bestowed on the