As the dusk of evening creeps from the mysterious arch-
ways it marches by our side. Through the crooked streets
and past the mouldering portals it guides us; and when,
traversing the wide and vacant square, we stand within
the shadow of the cathedral--it speaks.

Where can one go to find a cathedral so impressive?
Among those who aided to complete it was the Cardinal
de Lorraine, a man so noted for generosity that one day
in Rome, when he gave a blind man alms, the beggar ex-
claimed, "You are the Christ or the Cardinal de Lorraine."

The edifice bears the impress of such a liberality. The
silver shrine is rich beyond price. The single nave is
covered with one immense vault of blue and gold, the
widest in Christendom except the one at Gerona, ¹ where
long processions of kings and emperors, queens and ladies,
march slowly onward to the throne of judgment, con-
ducted by angels and awaited by cherubim and seraphim.
In the choir a glorious company of apostles and saints
look down from above a hundred and twenty seats of
carved oak. In the middle of the rood-loft hangs a silver
lamp; and so perfect is the orientation of the edifice that
it catches a beam of sunlight at the summer and the winter
solstice, and flashes resplendently in the midst of the dark
chancel. The rood-screen, pronounced by Viollet-le-Duc
"certainly the most vast, the most complete, the most
precious," seems to repeat the miracle of Sinai, when the
finger of God wrote the tables of the Law, for a peculiarly
unwilling stone has been made to take on the guise of
spontaneous life, its forms countless, its variety and ca-
priciousness infinite, its intricacy past finding out, its de-
light and its harmony inexhaustible.

But these things and even the magnificence of the porch
are only details. What we think of chiefly is the cathe-
dral as a leonine unit, a unit of power, rising out of the
quaint mass of buildings grouped on the headland above

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