kes long journeys, from monument to monument; to gigantic
condottieri, riding ghost-like in the semi-darkness against the upper
walls; to Luca's saints and angels in the sacristies; to Donatellos's
Saint John, grand and tranquil in his niche, and to Michelangelo's
group, grand and troubled in its rough-hewn marble.

At length, in the north transept, he comes to a small door, and entering
there, he may, if legs and wind hold out, climb five hundred and fifteen
steps to the top of the mightiest dome in the world, the widest in span,
and the highest from spring to summit. For the first one hundred and
fifty steps or so, there are square turnings, and the stone looks sharp,
and new, and solid; a space vaulted by a domical roof follows, and is
apparently above one of the apsidal domes to the church; then a narrow
spiral staircase leads to where a second door opens upon a very narrow,
balustraded walk that runs around the inner side of the dome.

He is at an altitude of sixty-seven meters, exactly at the spring of the
cupola and the beginning of the Vasari frescoes; the feet are at an
elevation of one meter less than is that of the lower tops of Notre Dame
de Paris, and yet the dome follows away overhead, huge enough, high
enough to contain a second church piled, Pelion-like upon the first.
Before, in the dimness, is the vastest roof-covered void in the world;
it is terrific, and if the visitor is susceptible, his knees shake, and
his diaphragm seems to sink to meet them.

The impression is tremendous; no wonder that the Tuscans felt
Brunelleschi to be the central figure of the Renaissance. Again and
again, whether in the gallery or between the walls of the dome, the
thought comes; men built this, and one man dared it and planned it. Not
even the Pyramids impress more strongly; for if Brunelleschi built a
lesser pyramid, he hollowed his and hung it in the air.

On the other side of the space, a small black spot becomes a door when
the traveler has giddily circled half the dome; it opens upon another
staircase, up which he climbs between the two skins of the cupola, or
rather between two of the three, like a parasite upon a monster.
Sometimes the place suggests a ship, with the oculi as gunports,
piercing to the outer day, or else, his mind fresh from that red inferno
of Vasari's frescoes, the traveler is tunneling up through a volcanic
crater with a whole Typhonic Enceladus buried below.

To right and left, the smooth, ce