After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from my
gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in a most devoted manner.
The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their
Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed.
He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks.
But he nodded rather eagerly, being only too ready to explain the Gothic splendours to someone more likely to be sympathetic than the Presbyterian blacksmith or the atheist cobbler.
Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide.
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
But in the round keep, a shape only seen in the most ancient castles the chambers excavated in the thickness of the walls and buttresses the difficulty by which access is gained from one story to those above it, Coningsburgh still retains the simplicity of its origin, and shows by what slow degrees man proceeded from occupying such rude and inconvenient lodgings, as were afforded by the galleries of the Castle of Mousa, to the more splendid accommodations of the Norman castles, with all their stern and
Gothic graces.
We passed by a picturesque old
gothic ruin whose stone pavements had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode through a piece of country which we were told once knew Samson as a citizen.
The front-door was like a church porch, and the drawing-room windows were
gothic.
Were they not the subtlest creations of the age in which
Gothic art was spontaneous?
Sleary himself, a stout modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche of early
Gothic architecture, took the money.
The Cambridge Companion to American
Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
American
Gothic Literature: A Thematic Study from Mary Rowlandson to Colson Whitehead
