iction had just begun. On his immediate right, before the altar all
aglow with lights, were the officiating priests and the altar-boys; on
his left, in the choir, was the congregation in the Canons' stalls;
and at the back, as at the end of a nave, rose the organ.

The traveller walked about the ambulatory, and leaning against the
farthest wall, tried to view the church, only to be baffled. There was
no perspective. The ambulatory is very narrow and the choir-screen very
high. The impressions he formed were partly imaginative, partly
inductive; and the clearest one was that of sheer height, straight,
superhuman height that is one of the unmatchable glories of French
Gothic. Here the traveller thought again of Beauvais, and wished as he
had so often wished in the northern Cathedral and with something of the
same intensity, that this freedom and majesty of height might have been
gloriously continued and completed in the nave. Such a church as his
imagination pictured would have been worthy of a place with the best of
northern Gothic. Now it is a suggestion, a beginning of greatness; and
its chief glory lies in the simplicity and directness of its height.
Clustered columns rise plainly to the pointed Gothic roof. There is so
marked an absence of carving that it seems as if ornamentation would
have been weakening and trammelling. It is not bareness, but beautiful
firmness, which refreshes and uplifts the heart of man as the sight of
some island mountain rising sheer from the sea.

The exterior of the Cathedral, imposing from a distance, is rather
complicated in its unfinished compromise of detail. In the XV century,
two towers were built which flank the western end as towers usually
flank a facade; and this gives the church a foreshortened effect. Of
real facade there is none, and the front wall which protects the choir
is plainly temporary. In front of this wall there are portions of the
unfinished nave, stones and other building materials, a scaffolding, and
a board fence; and the only pleasure the traveller could find in this
confusion was the fancy that he had discovered the old-time appearance
of a Cathedral in the making.

The apse is practically completed, and one has the curious sensation
that it is a building without portals. Having no facade, it has none of
the great front entrances common to the Gothic style; neither has it the
usual lateral door. The choir is entered by the temporary doors of the
pseudo-facade