om the clouds, I could
not discover.

What an air of languor and weariness on the faces of the people! Amid
these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have
been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow,
of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world
than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all
life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of
Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The
Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if
one may judge from their looks,--a future full of revolutions, to
conduct, mayhap, to freedom; more probably to the scaffold.

I turned sharply round the corner of a street, and there, as if it had
risen from the earth, was the Cathedral. As the sun breaking through a
fog, or an Alpine peak flashing through mists, so burst this
magnificent pile upon me; and its sudden revelation dispelled on the
instant all my gloomy musings. I could only stand and gaze. Beauty, not
sublimity, is the attribute of this pile. Beauty it rains around it in a
never-ending, overflowing shower, as the sun does light, or Mont Blanc
glory. I sought for some one presiding idea, simple and grand, which
might take its place in the mind, and dwell there as an image of glory,
never more to fade; but I could find no such idea. The pile is the slow
creation of centuries, and the united conception of innumerable minds,
which have clubbed their ideas, so to speak, to produce this Cathedral.
Quarries of marble and millions of money have been expended upon it; and
there is scarce an architect or sculptor of eminence who has flourished
since the fourteenth century, who has not contributed to it some
separate grace or glory; and now the Cathedral of Milan is perhaps the
most numerous assemblage of beauties in stone which the world contains.
Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to
bottom,--its carved portals, its flying buttresses, its arabesque
pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-reliefs, its
beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the
sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear
the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some
Alpine group, whose flashing peaks shoot up by hundreds around some
snow-white central summit.

The building, too, is