m of God is already come to
those who have tamed in their own hearts what was rampant of the lower
nature, and have learned to cherish what is lovely and human, in the
wandering children of the clouds and fields.

AVALLON, _28th August_, 1882.

CHAPTER IV.

INTERPRETATIONS.

1. It is the admitted privilege of a custode who loves his cathedral
to depreciate, in its comparison, all the other cathedrals of his
country that resemble, and all the edifices on the globe that differ
from it. But I love too many cathedrals--though I have never had the
happiness of becoming the custode of even one--to permit myself the
easy and faithful exercise of the privilege in question; and I must
vindicate my candour, and my judgment, in the outset, by confessing
that the cathedral of AMIENS has nothing to boast of in the way of
towers,--that its central fleche is merely the pretty caprice of a
village carpenter,--that the total structure is in dignity inferior to
Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims,
and in loveliness of figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like
the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury--nothing
of the might of Durham;--no Daedalian inlaying like Florence, no glow
of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these,
ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the
name given it by M. Viollet le Duc--

"The Parthenon of Gothic Architecture."[40]

2. Of Gothic, mind you; Gothic clear of Roman tradition, and of
Arabian taint; Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and
unaccusable;--its proper principles of structure being once understood
and admitted.

[Footnote 40: Of French Architecture, accurately, in the place quoted,
"Dictionary of Architecture," vol. i. p. 71; but in the article
"Cathedrale," it is called (vol. ii. p. 330) "l'eglise _ogivale_ par
excellence."]

No well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the
meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in
the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and
few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The
purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone
of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as spacious as
he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and
wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsio