erable churches; and the rapid passage from a
street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming
with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and
whole worlds of dirty people--make up, altogether, such a scene of
wonder; so lively, and yet so dead; so noisy, and yet so quiet; so
obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering; so wide-awake, and yet so fast
asleep; that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and
on, and on, and look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all
the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of
an extravagant reality!...

In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size
notwithstanding, and extremely high. They are very dirty; quite
undrained, if my nose be at all reliable; and emit a peculiar fragrance,
like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets.
Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been
a lack of room in the city, for new houses are thrust in everywhere.
Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a
crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall
of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you
are sure to find some kind of habitation; looking as if it had grown
there, like a fungus. Against the Government House, against the old
Senate House, round about any large building, little shops stick close,
like parasite vermin to the great carcass. And for all this, look where
you may; up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere; there are irregular
houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their
neighbors, crippling themselves or their friends by some means or other,
until one, more irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you
can't see any further.

MILAN CATHEDRAL[2]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

The cathedral, at the first sight, is bewildering. Gothic art,
transported entire into Italy at the close of the Middle Ages,[3]
attains at once its triumph and its extravagance. Never had it been seen
so pointed, so highly embroidered, so complex, so overcharged, so
strongly resembling a piece of jewelry; and as, instead of coarse and
lifeless stone, it here takes for its material the beautiful lustrous
Italian marble, it becomes a pure chased gem as precious through its
substance as through the labor bestowed on it. The whole church seems to