Cathedral city

“ Like the Acropolis of Athens, the cathedral of a medieval city was intended to glorify the grandeur of the victorious city, to symbolize the union of its crafts, to express the glory of each citizen in a city of his own creation. After having achieved its craft revolution, the city often began a new cathedral in order to express the new, wider, and broader union which had been called into life. ”

“ The great cathedral around which every thing centres remains unchanged in all its majesty; crooked streets, narrow and dark, yet in this sunshine cheerful withal, wind off and away from it down into the old city. If you take that one to your right you will find the house where Louis XI. was born; or the one to the left will lead you straight to the palace of "Jacques Cœur" as they call him; turn in any direction and these old streets will show you houses and palaces of the long ago, smiling down upon you or retiring in magnificent seclusion behind high walls. ”

“ The central parts of the city have broad streets and squares, bordered with fine buildings and mansions in the Italian style, and with good shops. The cathedral, founded in 1794 and finished in 1809, and thoroughly restored in 1903, can accommodate 5000 persons ”

“ The cathedral was adorned with the richest marbles the world could furnish, and the highest art of the age was lavished in its structure and ornament. The windows reach from the roof nearly to the ground, and with their rich decorations give a peculiar beauty to the interior. The city has again and again been ravaged by enemies; other buildings have been razed to their foundations, but this has steadily stood in the midst of war and fires and centuries of decay and change. Long has it been the shrine of Roman worship, for Pope Leo consecrated it in 804 ”

“ The cathedral of this old city is visited by architects from all parts of Europe and America, solely for the purpose of professional study, it being one of the finest examples of the Gothic order in existence, while the richness of its ornamentation and its artistic wealth, not to mention in detail its gold and silver plate, make it the rival of most cathedrals in the world, with the possible exception of that at Burgos. ”

“ The sun—the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man—burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray. ”

“ We rode quickly past the arabesque buildings, the rich Gothic churches, the sculptured palaces, and the Moorish courts, through the gaudy, noisy market-place, with its stirring crowd, in garb as bright and various as that of a harlequinade, and out into the blazing white squares and sunny gardens, until the cool dim vault of the old cathedral once more hung over us like a grey cloud of stone. ”

“ Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty. ”

“ In what profusion are the antique slabs, with their great brass crosses. How the very atmosphere of the place is fragrant with the memory of the sainted dead! In visiting these cathedrals, in looking on the ruins of ancient abbey or monastery,—so complete in themselves, and exhibiting such evidence of former grandeur,—one is inclined to feel that each is the cathedral of all England,—the Mecca of all the Church; for what is lacking? Not capacity or costliness; not lack of graves of kings, earls, barons, or lords, for here beneath our feet repose the dust of enough such for an entire kingdom. ”

“ Shrines and chapels, set in grand, heavy frames of pillared architecture, stand all along the aisles and transepts, and these seem in many instances to have been built and enriched by noble families, whose arms are sculptured on the pedestals of the pillars, sometimes with a cardinal's hat above to denote the rank of one of its members. How much pride, love, and reverence in the lapse of ages must have clung to the sharp points of all this sculpture and architecture! The cathedral is a religion in itself, —something worth dying for to those who have an hereditary interest in it. ”

“ The cathedral itself is the heart of the charming old place—so rich in tone, so impressive in outline, so profusely yet delicately adorned, it rose at the end of the long market-square, shedding on it, even through the grey sheets of rain, the warmth of its high tawny masses. The design of the western front is so full and harmonious that it effaces from memory the less salient impression of the interior. ”

“ All these puerilities do not lack charm, especially when they keep us in the cool shadow of a cathedral, at the hottest and most blinding hour of the day....
The day declines. It is the moment when all the beauty of the cathedral is revealed. Now the contrasts of lights and shades become more moving. A soft green clarity fills the choir, and lends to its architecture a more subtle and airy grace; it filters through the high openings of the nave, illuminates the pointed arches of the vaulting, accentuates the ramifications of the arches; the whole structure appears lighter and more triumphal. ”

“ The interior of the cathedral impresses by its vastness and height. A wider nave is not to be found among the cathedrals of France, and the aisles are proportionate in width. The eye ranges upwards to the wonderful roof, with its opulent decoration, to the beautiful triforium, and the tall, narrow windows of the clerestory. ”

“ The south sacristy door is a fine specimen of Gothic work. Unlike the exterior effect, nothing obtrudes inside this great cathedral. The eye on entering looks straight up to the east, conscious as it travels there, of great pillars rising into the gloom of the vault above, of fine glass and restful solemnity, in which even the chapels in the aisles are lost, to be discovered later on only when searched for. ”

“ Through dreamy distances of chequered light and tangled shadow, the glance travels under a sort of spell, and unconsciously the fancy grows that you are gazing through the aisles of a vast cathedral illuminated by myriad and wondrously stained windows—not a cathedral wrought by the hands of man, nor one whose stillness was ever broken by his feverish tread, but the ruins of a colossal judgment hall, or place of worship, created by some long-gone superhuman race, of whose existence we retain no record. ”

“ Seldom in France do we find the cathedral so regally free of surrounding buildings. No shabby structures lean unworthy heads against its old grey walls, and where, on the north side, the canons' library, with its crumbling timbers of the fifteenth century, nestles under the wing of the church, the effect is entirely pleasing. ”

“ The Gothic cathedral, thus contemplated in its native character and principles—established in unmoved security by the very agency of those forces which tend most directly to destruction, displays an evidence of science, perhaps, when the times are considered, the most wonderful in the whole history of intelligence. Never have the stereometric precepts of building—one of the most difficult branches of the art, been better exhibited than in these piles. Mass counteracts mass,—the very confliction of downward efforts upholds the reed-like column, and hangs on high the ponderous vault. ”

“ In the nave is a beautiful pulpit, built in 1486, and covered with little statues, delicately carved, and not far from it the organ, up midway between the floor and arched ceiling. The perspective view in these old cathedrals is grand, and figures hardly give one an idea of their vastness. This cathedral is five hundred and twenty-five feet long, one hundred and ninety-five feet in width, and is one of the finest of those wonderful monuments of religious art that rose during the middle ages. ”

“ A cathedral represents the collective art, work, and thought of centuries. The names of its builders, its masons, its carvers, its glaziers, are lost; the heads and hands that carried out the work, whose invention and feeling, whose very life have been wrought into the stone and the wood and the glass, have left no other record. An abbot's or a bishop's name may be given as having planned or raised the money for this choir or that porch at different times, but the artists and craftsmen who did the work generally remain unknown. ”

“ Innumerable other works and wonders there are, and the sacristies contain great value of goldsmiths' products; but, unless it be made a subject of long artistic study, the fundamental charm of the cathedral consists in its general aspects, its mysterious perspectives, its proportions so simple and grandiose; the isolated pictures formed at almost any point by jewelled and candle-lit chapels sparkling dimly through a permanent dusk, rainbowed here and there by the light from old stained windows. ”

“ A Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ultimately draws the beholder and his universe into its harmony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough and rich enough. ”

“ This battered yet coherent little edifice has the touching look that resides in everything supremely old: it has arrived at the age at which such things cease to feel the years; the waves of time have worn its edges to a kind of patient dul- ness; there is something mild and smooth, like the stillness, the deafness, of an octogenarian, even in its rudeness of ornament, and it has become insensible to differences of a century or two. The cathedral interested me much less than Our Lady the Great, and I have not the spirit to go into statistics about it. ”

“ One turned to the other and said, ‘Look, two foreign travellers and the lady’s-maid!’ I carry no more wraps!
Now, of only one more joy shall I tell you. The cathedral and its contents! We had looked again and again at its tall, graceful, delicate spire, rising high above the houses, and we had heard its sweet, soft bells before{288} going in. But now we have seen its inside walls and the glories they hold. The interior of the edifice is comparatively cold and barren, but the paintings within are delightful and surprise enough for a life-time. ”

“ As we see it now, within its grassy close, the cathedral is a singularly perfect work, chiefly of the thirteenth century, rich above all other English cathedrals in delicate sculpture, and with sixty carved miserere seats that display the sweetest artistic fancy, the closest study of natural forms, and the most exquisite craftsmanship in wood-carving to be found in England. ”

“ When one dropped one's eyes form these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty, the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.
It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. ”

“ Its beauty persists. It triumphs over shadows and forces me to admire its powerful black harmony. It fills my window, it almost hides the sky. How explain why, even when enveloped in night, this cathedral loses nothing of its beauty? Does the power of that beauty transcend the senses, that the eye sees what it sees not?... ”

“ The exterior of the cathedral, being huge, is therefore grand; it has a great central tower, and two at the western end; and reposes in vast and heavy length, without the multitude of niches, and crumbling statues, and richness of detail, that make the towers and fronts of some cathedrals so endlessly interesting. One piece of sculpture I remember—a carving of a cow, a milkmaid, and a monk, in reference to the legend that the site of the cathedral was, in some way, determined by a woman bidding her cow go home to Dunholme. ”

“ A Gothic cathedral is an attempt at a universal expression of humanity, a stone image of society, in which each particle, insignificant by itself, has its meaning in the connection. It was the fresh interest in the attempt that gave birth to that wonderful architecture. ”

“ The general appearance of the interior of a Gothic cathedral, with its long perspective of nave, aisles, and choir, its finely proportioned triforia and clerestories, and, above all, its graceful arches leading up to their points of union in the soaring roof, may justly be called a poem in stone, whilst its exterior is equally remarkable for the close correlation of all its parts, producing an impression of consistent unity of design. ”