90 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

isolated or branching from the central chain, and by retrograde or parallel directions of the valley 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 zone-

“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.”¹

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, and 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.

§ 23. 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 proportion and decoration of the mouldings of the window at Rouen, in Plate X., as compared with earlier mouldings, because that beauty and care are singularly significant. They mark that the traceries had caught the eye of the architect. Up to that time, up to

* So completely was this the case, that M. Viollet le Duc, in his article on tracery in the Dictionnaire d’ Architecture,2 has confined his attention exclusively to the modifications of the tracery bar. The subject is examined exhaustively in my sixth lecture in Val d’ Arno. [1880.]

¹ [Rogers’ Italy (“The Alps”). The words “Like a silver zone” are also part of the quotation.]

² [The article is under the heading “Meneau” in vol. vi. of this “noble” work (see Proserpina, ii. ch. 8)-Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’ Architecture Francaise de XI. au XVI^e Siècle, by M. Viollet-le-Duc. Paris, 1858.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]