Cathedral

“ Of course you go into the cathedral, and how forcibly that swing of the door, as you doff your hat in the cooler air, recalls the old tourist strayings and pryings beneath other skies! You find a big garish church, with a cold high light, a promiscuity of stucco and gilding, and a mild odour of the seventeenth century. ”

“ The vast white stone columns, with their prodigal carving, were stained ruby, amber, emerald, the seven colors of the rainbow, by the sunlight falling through those jewel windows. The cathedral is a museum in itself. ”

“ The hour to enter the cathedral is at the Ave Maria, when the sun is low and its rays tremble on the burnished walls in irises of gold, and the great painted windows stand out in a pale light, alive with venerable forms of law-givers, prophets, and kings ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the morning I threw open the windows and the sun came dancing in, flooding the room with gold. In front of me the great wall of the cathedral stood grim and grey, and the gargoyles looked savagely across the square.... The cathedral is admirable; when you enter you find yourself at once in darkness, and the air is heavy with incense; but, as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, you see the black forms of penitents kneeling by pillars, looking towards an altar, and by the light of the painted windows a reredos, with the gaunt saints of an early painter, and aureoles shining dimly. ”

“ Beautiful and imposing at all times is a Gothic cathedral, but never more so than when the trembling light of a winter moon throws around it a soft halo, just enough to make its grand proportions visible amid the surrounding gloom, while leaving all the finer details wrapt in sombre mystery. ”

“ Before a huge fire which lighted all the deep recess of the high over-arching rock that rose sublime as the lofty roof of a Gothic cathedral, sat five wild-looking men of strange semi-nautical raiment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like the human face, the cathedral has its cast of expression, a kind of soft tenderness, or placid, quiet solitariness, wholly different from the air of perky sharpness and strutting detail which photographs present. ”

“ After another glimpse at the cathedral, too, I realize how utterly I have failed in conveying the idea of its elaborate ornament, its twisted and clustered pillars, and numberless devices of sculpture; nor did I mention the venerable statues that stand all round the summit of the edifice, relieved against the sky,—the highest of all being one of the Saviour, on the topmost peak of the front; nor the tall tower that ascends from one side of the building, and is built of layers of black and white marble piled one upon another in regular succession ”

“ It is a mighty cathedral, standing in the midst of prosaic mountains, surely one of the most beautiful and majestic of these mountains, symbolic in its shape and its ancient name. We have slept on the mossy earth at the foot of the pines. We will arise and go to the sun. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the venerable cathedral, in which our forefathers sought God and found Him, grows dangerously unsound; when its columns have crumbled and its arches have sprung, and its stout oaken timbers have dried into dust; the guardians of the sacred pile must plan its restoration as best they can. They must shore up its treacherous walls, take out its dead materials, carve new heads for the saints in the niches of the doors, build up the edifice anew, following faithfully as may be the old lines, and striving for the old spirit. ”

“ Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards of the flying buttress,—the visible effort to throw off a visible strain,—never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. ”

“ I believe I am peculiarly alive to architectural excitements, for these old houses, with their strange windows, odd chimneys, and quaint carvings, delight me wonderfully. Many of them are almost gnome-like in their uncouthness; they please me none the less for that.
We drove first to the cathedral, which, with an old deserted church, seemingly part of itself, forms a pile of Gothic architecture, a wilderness of spires, minarets, arches, and what not, more picturesque than any cathedral I have seen. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cathedral is narrow in proportion to its length; it is the long-drawn aisle of the poet in perfection, and there is something grandly elegant in the unity of effect produced by this unobstructed perspective. The charm is increased by a singular architectural fantasy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 a quaint, squat structure, with pinnacled tower, standing in the midst of a crowded graveyard, the most prominent object in which is an obelisk erected over the bodies of those who fell in the siege. ”

“ Not only is there built into a mediæval cathedral the accumulated thought of all the men who had occupied themselves with building during the preceding centuries, but you have the dream and aspiration of the bishop, abbot, or clergy for whom it was designed; the master mason’s skilled construction; the work of the carver, the painter, the glazier, the host of men who, each in his own craft, knew all that had been done before them, and had spent their lives in struggling to surpass the works of their forefathers. ”

“ The cathedral is surrounded by a high wall, the gates of which,--its eyelids,--are closed every night at a seasonable hour, at which the virtuous inhabitants are expected to be in their safe and sacred quarters. Houses within this hallowed precinct naturally bring a higher rent than those of the unsanctified and unprotected region outside of its walls. It is a realm of peace, glorified by the divine edifice, which lifts the least imaginative soul upward to the heavens its spire seems trying to reach; beautified by rows of noble elms which stretch high aloft, as if in emulation of the spire ”

“ 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 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 cathedral is good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions. ”

“ 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?... ”

“ For though I have heard a considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. ’Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night, not only telling you of man’s art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies.” At all events, a cathedral is much more and other than a place to preach in. ”

“ Thus, in this cathedral, the eye embraces the inward distribution at one glance from the shape of the parts outside.’ From a distance the most conspicuous parts of the edifice are the steeples surmounting the west front and the lantern over the crossing. The delicacy and nobility of the spires, pinnacles, and open-work adorning the glorious fabric tempt one to rhapsody. But so much beauty can be adequately portrayed only by the brush, not by the pen. ”

“ There is nothing grander and more impressive in cathedral architecture than to view the gradual unfolding of the interior as the sight becomes more accustomed to the sudden transition of the outside glare of day to the subdued light inside. ”

“ This cathedral of Rheims is beautiful above all cathedrals. On the façade are kings; on the absis, people being put to the torture by executioners. Coronation of kings with an accompaniment of victims. The façade is one of the most magnificent symphonies ever sung by that music, architecture. One dreams for a long time before this oratorio. Looking up from the square you see at a giddy height, at the base of the two towers, a row of gigantic statues representing kings of France. ”

“ The interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty, and, above all, a tremendous height. The nave is extraordinary in this respect; it dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I am, in architecture, always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great building seems to me, while I look at it, the ultimate expression. ”

“ The interior of the cathedral is in every way worthy of the noble aspect of the exterior. If even the idle stranger is struck with sentiments of veneration when he surveys its noble proportions—its lofty vaulted roof and its long aisles—what must be the feeling of the worshipper who comes inspired by faith to pray in such a temple? ”

“ 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. ”